Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/390

354 Oxford. While wisely making no changes in Maine's text, Sir Frederick Pollock, in a note appended to each chapter, gives a concise criticism of its contents, enforced by frequent and learned reference to the modern literature dealing with the subject. Treatment of this kind is perhaps the severest test to which a book can be subjected, and the result of it in the present case is a notable witness to the permanent value of Maine's classical work.

The second edition of Mr. Seebohm's Tribal System in Wales consists of a reissue of the book without material alteration. Since the appearance of the first edition Mr. Seebohm has published the results of his researches into primitive English society in his Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law, which thus forms to some extent a companion volume to the present work, and in a long and interesting Introductory Note we are given some account of the questions in regard to which Welsh custom is illustrated by reference to Germanic evidence. There is no need to enlarge here upon the value of Mr. Seebohm's work. He has for the first time given a scientific statement of the evidence contained in the Welsh codes and has established the reality of the social conditions which they imply by reference to the extents and similar records of local provenance which have come down to us from the Edwardian period. For many years yet scholars may continue to dispute the extent to which Anglo-Saxon society has been affected by previous Celtic custom, but whatever conclusion ultimately finds acceptance will be profoundly indebted to Mr. Seebohm's reconstruction of the main features of Welsh tribal society.

second volume of the Sociological Society's publications, though not less interesting than its predecessor, makes less