Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/534

 47 6 Reviews.

a convinced adherent of the EngUsh anthropological school, and he sets forth and vindicates its principles with a directness and a vigour too often lacking among English scholars. He is an uncompromising evolutionist, and his firm grasp of principle enables him to avoid inconsistencies and to keep clear of unnecessary concessions such as at times irritate one in English work. To one who has never wavered in his allegiance to the evolutionary principle, who has always held that " hors de rhistoire" (of the belief or practice under investigation) '■'■point de salut" who has steadily maintained from the first that folk-lore represents in the main the protoplasm out of which the higher beliefs have evolved by a process of differentiation and refine- ment, and not a coarsened, weakened degradation of those beliefs, it is a delight to find his faith championed with such wealth of accurate knowledge, such force of critical reasoning. Owing to the nature of M. Reinach's book — a series of independent monographs each worthy of specialist criticism — it is impossible to do more here than indicate its leading characteristics, and commend it warmly to all English students desirous of appreciating the true scope and import of modern anthropological and folk- lore research, and justly interested in noting the esteem in which the work of our English masters is held by one of the most acccomplished of Continental scholars.

Alfred Nutt.

Des Divinites Generatrices, ou du Culte du Phallus CHEZ LES Anciens et les Modernes. By J. A. Dulaure.. Paris: Societe du Mercure de France, 1905.

M. Dulaure's famous book, originally issued a hundred years ago, is here reprinted ; and M. A. van Gennep has added " a. complementary chapter."

The author of the book was one of the pioneers of the anthro- pological method of investigating human history. He points out in his preface the aridity of a history, as history was then usually