Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/134

 I02 Reviews.

Many of the critical reviews in the remainder of the volume are distinguished by excellence. Among those particularly interesting to readers of Folk-Lore may be mentioned one by M. Mauss on the two recent works — that by Merker and that by Hollis — on the Masai, and one by Prof". Durkheim on Dr. Howitt's Native Tribes of South-Easl Australia.

E. Sidney Hartland.

The Todas. By W. H. R. Rivers, Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. Macmillan and Co. 1906. Price 2 IS. net.

In this account of the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills in Southern India Dr. Rivers has given us not only an elaborate description of a singularly interesting people, but has supplied a model of anthropological investigation on truly scientific lines. When it is remembered that his visit to their country occupied only five months, and that being ignorant of their language he was dependent upon the services of interpreters, the amount and accuracy of the information which he has collected testify to the energy and tactfulness with which his enquiries were conducted. He fully admits that in many directions his information is still incomplete. In fact, the impression which his book leaves upon me is that, as in the case of all anthropological investigations in India, and for that matter among all savage and semi-savage races, the Toda reserves a forbidden chamber in his brain, in which the secrets of his beliefs and cults are still jealously guarded. Unless this fact be admitted, many of the facts recorded in this monograph are still to a large extent unintelligible. "Whether the veil which shrouds the tribal mysteries will ever be raised it is impossible to say. But with the experience which Dr. Rivers has already gained no one at present is likely to be able to push the investigation a step further, and in the interests of ethnological research it is to be hoped that he may be given the opportunity