Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/379

 REVIEWS.

Savage Childhood : a Study of Kafir Cliildren. By Dudley KiDD. London: A. and C. Black. 1906.

The interesting and well-informed author of The Essential Kafir returns to the charge with a book that broaches a subject hitherto almost untouched. At first one wonders why so fasci- nating a theme as savage babyhood viewed from the inside has not attracted the attention of a host of observers, more especially as the first-hand anthropologist is not infrequently a woman. To the reflection, however, that ensues upon reading such a book as this it is apparent that no ordinary observation will prevail against the shyness and suspicion of the little primitives, let alone those of their parents. Mr. Kidd's work is the fruit of long experience wedded to quite uncommon tact and insight, and in almost all respects may serve as a model to the numerous following it is likely to call into existence.

Perhaps the most forcible impression left by the book as a whole is that, whatever may seem to be the case with the man, the child at any rate is the child all the world over. A false or, what is much the same thing, a one-sided because purely individual psychology leads many to suppose that in the adult savage they have the natural man, a being likewise supposed to lurk somewhere in themselves. But the savage, of course, is the most sophisticated and conventionalised of mortals — more so, perhaps, than the picked representatives of civilisation. But the child taken in the raw and before he is caught and cooked, so to speak, in the hot-pot of society's