Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/383

 Reviews. 347

of the Australian evidence is accurate. We must not judge savage beliefs entirely by the standard of our own mental opera- tions. Our categorical affirmations and denials and clear-cut definitions are foreign to traditional creeds. In my judgement the Arunta are neither primitive atheists on their way to mono- theism, nor monotheists whose faith has waned. Something much more nebulous than either atheism or monotheism, or indeed any kind of theism, lies behind their present condition. For this Dr. Jevons has not made allowance : he has not even considered the possibiUty of it. How, if correct, it will affect his argument is not for me to say.

The rest of the volume, like all that he vi^rites, is well worth reading. It is lucid ; it is skilful ; but —

" How can he give his neighbour the real ground, His own conviction?"

E. Sidney Hartland.

The Religious Songs of Connacht. By Douglas Hyde. London : T. Fisher Unwin. Dublin : W. H. Gill & Son.

I OS.

From the folk-lore point of view the interest of Dr. Hyde's Religions Songs of Connacht lies in the large number of charms and poems enshrining old superstitions which it contains. As Dr, Hyde says in his preface, " poems, prayers, petitions, charms, stories, blessings, curses, and everything else of the kind," are here set down and published in the same mixed manner in which they came into the collector's hand. The book is thus a curious record of those back-waters of civilisation where superstition longest keeps its hold, and where the border- line that stands between paganism and Christianity is grown so fine that it is difficult to tell whether many of these ' ranns ' belong more strictly to the one sphere or to the other. Occasionally the collector makes an effort to discriminate between the two traditions, as where he traces the origin of two curses called respectively the " Reversed Journey " and