Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/146

 1 1 4 Reviews.

All the descriptions of the figures have been written according to the method devised by Dr. Haddon and myself,^ but Mrs. Jayne has introduced some modifications which seem to me to impair seriously the exactness and definiteness of the method. The words *' near " and *' far " applied to a string on the hands are equivocal. They may mean that the string is nearer to, or farther from, the eyes of the person making the figure, or they may mean that the string is nearer to, or farther from, the wrist. Further, the words "upper" and "lower," as applied to strings on the hands or fingers, may cease to be correct if the position of the hands be changed. These words were, there- fore, rejected at an early stage of the attempts to discover a method of recording string figures, and to replace them four terms were borrowed from the customary nomenclature of anatomy, each of which has a single unmistakable meaning. Mrs. Jayne has preferred the discarded terms, with the result that strings may have to be called upper and lower when they really lie in the same horizontal plane, while in the large group of string figures in which the toes are used as well as the fingers, the terms have to be employed still more incorrectly. In these figures the hands have to be held with the fingers downwards, so that the " upper string " would be below the " lower string," and the "near string" at the same distance as the "far string." It is true that this group of figures is not referred to in the book, but the ideal method should be capable of meeting all contingencies, and Mrs. Jayne's modification might also lead to confusion where several people, it is said as many as eight in New Guinea, take part in the formation of a figure. When, however, one has defined for oneself the exact way in which the four terms in question are to be used, the descriptions given in the book are extremely clear, and I have met with no example in which I have not been able readily to construct a figure from the description.

There is one aspect of these games which has received no notice from Mrs. Jayne, nor, so far as I know, from others who have written on the subject. These games are of much psychological interest, and this is at the same time an ethnological interest, for

^ Mail, 1902, p. 146.