Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/381

Rh his father, it turns out, would not care to wear a dead man's blanket if it has been worn but once. Or the child may confuse self with his shadow. But as a matter of fact it is found necessary by the elders to teach the heedless children to respect the shadows of their betters. In short, there may be little self-consciousness in a certain sense of the term in savage adult or savage child, but it is hardly the sense of the term proper to those individual psychologies to which Mr. Kidd is fond of referring us.

Besides its supreme importance as a contribution to psychology, individual and social, the book is a storehouse of valuable material in the way of folk-lore of all kinds. Mr. Kidd has the gift of complete observation. Thus on p. 23 he gives, apparently without penetrating into the meaning of the custom, a case of the lunar sympathy recently explained by Dr. Frazer (Adonis Attis Osiris, 305 ff.), with just the detail required for its identification. Very rarely do we notice a lack of precise statement, as where, for instance, killing a man of conspicuous character in order to form intelezi wherewith to wash the chief's babies is spoken of as if a universal Kafir practice (p. 19). Mr. Kidd does not often seek to round off his observations with a theory, yet occasionally he does it with marked success. Thus his appendix (H. cf. p. 24 and p. 289), on the danger of looking backwards, cleverly suggests that the underlying idea is that as long as the man sees the holy and dangerous object, by one to which a sickness has been transferred, the object cannot see, and so 'overlook' him. Even more interesting is his study of the difference of meaning between idhlozi and itongo (App. A. cf. pp. 12-15, 21-26, etc.). These terms and the corresponding ideas are generally confused; but Mr. Kidd gives good reason to think that they refer to two quite distinct kinds of spirit. The former is a man's individual spirit, that after death haunts the grave and in time evaporates. The latter is an ancestral spirit, or, better, the ancestral mana or luck, since it is not so much the spirit of particular ancestors as something strictly corporate. In custom and ritual the itongo is for obvious reasons the more important of the two. It lives in the family hut and receives offerings. It is not