Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/256

 2 20 Reviews.

on the same lines, and I shall never forget the pleasure it was to me to trace the degeneration of a human-face design on the canoes of Torres Straits. Nor shall I readily forget the thrill which I experienced when I first visited the Pitt- Rivers Museum at Oxford, and every visit that I have since paid has resulted in stimulation and information. It is, therefore, with much pleasure that I, in common with so many colleagues, acknowledge the scientific acumen and indefatigable energy of the Founder of Comparative and Evolutionary Technology.

Alfred C. Haddon.

Adonis, Attis, Osiris. By J. G. Frazer, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D. Macmillan & Co. 1906.

Destined to form part of the third edition of The Golden Bought this book has all the characteristic merits of that vast work. The greatness of the author's erudition is concealed by a vivid and fascinating style which, especially in the descriptions of the scenery of Asia Minor, reaches a high order of merit. On the other hand, it must be admitted not to be free of the main defects of The Golden Bought a certain lack of discrimination in weighing evidence, and a tendency to draw important con- clusions from scraps of evidence utterly insufficient to bear the structure reared upon them.

This tendency appears very clearly in the most novel part of the book, the attempt to show that in the rituals of Adonis, Attis, and Osiris, the place of the god was at one time regularly taken by the king, who was put to death in order that the god, by casting off his old body, might regain his strength. This is a serious proposition, and marks a considerable advance on primitive conceptions of the corn-spirit. It is no doubt true that many peoples have held that at harvest-time the corn- spirit may pass into a man, and in some — we need not suppose in the majority — of the cases, have gone so far as to kill the human incarnation of the spirit, in order to make the corn grow well in the coming year. But a great gulf lies between this