Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/380

 344 Reviews.

' medicine ' is natural, and, as such, the subject of an indi- vidual psychology, in a way that you and I decidedly are not. It is most refreshing to observe, for instance, that just as Why-Why ate the oysters, so the small and unabashed Kafir will tuck into the small bird he snares on the veld though he ought to take it to his grandfather, and will in fact grow up into a wizard — an abandoned wretch — if he violates the taboo (p. 193). He does not "see the logic of the rule," as Mr. Kidd says. And so another infant sceptic could not see the use of puzzling about why the trees grew bigger. " The trees," he remarked to Mr. Kidd, " will grow as well without my troubling about the way they grow" (p. 152). Meanwhile his elders were practising all the devices of productive magic without a doubt but that they were powerfully fostering the crops. Nevertheless society, mostly by its appeal to the imitative powers, begins to set its stamp soon enough on the boys and girls, as their games and sports make plain. For instance, when they are playing down by the river at chief and followers, " the little chief is given a small white shield, and in the tremendous fights which follow, no one would dare to hit the boy with the white shield even in play ; it is thought a very bad thing to hit a chief, and therefore it is very bad to imitate such an action" (p. 175).

Indeed, about the only fault there is to find with Mr. Kidd's work is that perhaps he does not sufficiently distinguish between the effects of the social and the individual factors in child-life. A certain fallacy seems to run through his most ambitious chapter, the one entitled " The Dawn of Self- Consciousness." It reads a little as if the savage child "rounds to a separate mind " more slowly than the civilised because of an intrinsic slowness and feebleness of mental development. His is the " leisurely Arctic dawn " and ours the " hurried tropical sunrise " — despite the fact that he reaches puberty sooner. However, if Mr. Kidd somewhat fails to appreciate in explicit theory the importance of the influence of social environment, at all events his careful observations afford the necessary correction. The child may confuse self with his clothing and possessions, crying when they are beaten. But