Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/281

 Reviews. 245

Among the many interesting questions considered, I will only refer to one. We were able to gather from Macdonald's work that the Yao and Anyanja reckoned kinship through the mother. Miss Werner shows that they are divided into exogamous totem- clans, though she is unable to give anything like a list of those clans. I hope she has correspondents in the neighbourhood of Lake Nyassa who are able to supply her with this information, and to assist in the explanation of the clan-names, and the usages and superstitions relating to the totems. This is an urgent matter, as the missionaries and other influences of "civilisation" will, it is to be feared, very soon obliterate all memory of the old organisation and beliefs. Some of the Anyanja tribes are passing into the patrilineal stage, and what is most interesting is that they are doing so along precisely the same road as that adopted in German South-west Africa by the Herero. They have adopted a system of agnatic descent, and carry it on side by side with the older reckoning through the mother. The quotation Miss Werner makes from Bishop Maples — " the mother preserves to her offspring the tie of kinship, the father that of blood" — is incomprehensible to me. Mr. Thomas, in his book on Australian kinship, draws a distinction between blood and kinship, which may or may not be valid. But that distinction does not help us here. Bishop Maples' words may convey some subtle difference which a further investigation of the tribes he refers to may disclose. The fact of two distinct Bantu peoples at a distance from one another of nearly fifteen hundred miles as the crow flies, right across the continent, adopting the same device to smooth the passage from motherright to fatherright should help in the solution of more than one anthropological problem. Is it too late to recover the details of the ingenious arrangement which Bishop Maples was the first to make known ? Perhaps the author can secure them.

The illustrations, as a whole, are excellent. Though some are rather too small, many of them are of exceptional clearness and beauty, and effectively assist the reader to realise the various types of humanity and the customs described.

E. Sidney Hartland.