Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 17, 1906.djvu/131

 Reviews. 1 1 9

perfection than in the spirit of fault-finding. The transcription of native Australian names by English writers is admittedly everything that is bad. Cannot some standard orthography be adopted ? Mrs. Parker writes Byamee where others write Baiame. She writes Dayardee : what is the exact value of the first syllable ? Is it different from the first syllable of Byamee ? And what is the difference in the sound of the last syllable from that of Bargie or Gurroomi} How are such words sounded as Dhe (by the way, why is Dhe more correct for totem than Mah ? What is the exact •meaning of these two words ?), Yhi, Guie, Dheal, Gooleerh ? Is Hippitha or Hippatha (Mrs. Parker spells both ways on the same page) the more correct representation of native pronuncia- tion ? Possibly the pronunciation of the middle vowel is un- certain.

Mr. Lang writes an interesting introduction, in which " he fights his battles o'er again," especially his battles with Dr. Frazer, who seems to require a deal of slaying. I will only refer to one point which he makes, namely, that according to Mr. Howitt "the south-eastern tribes, with female descent of the totem, and with no belief in the universal and constant reincarnation of ancestral spirits," like the Arunta, " take the ^schylean view " of the origin of children. If Mr. Lang will look again at the passage on p. 283 of Dr. Howitt's book, he will see that the writer considers the " nurse " idea as one of the steps in the evolution of male descent. We cannot, therefore, infer that the tribes in question had not originally " the Arunta nescience of the facts of procreation." They may have been at one time quite ignorant of these facts, for all that Dr. Howitt says to the contrary, and the evolution of their speculation may simply have taken a different course from that of the Arunta. The causes of that difference still remain to be investigated.

The mention of Bishop Colenso on the first page of the intro» duction is a slip of the pen for Bishop Callaway.

E. Sidney Hartland.