Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/498

 452 Reviews.

adopted what he calls the " phylogenetic " system ; that is to say, he treats the three great tribes in distinct sections. This in some respects tends to clearness ; but it necessarily involves much repetition, and it stands in the way of that general account of the whole population, their ethnology, folk-lore, and beliefs, which would enable the reader to grasp the relation in which they stand to savagery in other parts of the world. The plan is, in short, more practical and scientific than artistic. But when, as in the introductory chapter, Mr. Skeat " lets himself go," he gives us a really delightful account of the influence of environment in a tropical jungle on human and animal life — a picture which will not suffer by comparison with the classical account by Dr. Wallace of the forests of the Amazon valley and of the Malay Archipelago.

The book may be most fitly described as an encyclopedia, a digest not merely of the results of personal investigations by the authors, but of all the contributions by earlier explorers which are mostly hidden away in publications not easily accessible to English students. This method of treatment has, it is true, the disadvantage of presenting the facts in a scrappy form, and it necessitates much criticism of the authorities. The work most largely utilised in this way is that of Hrolf Vaughan-Stevens, in his voluminous contributions to the Transactions of the Berlin Anthropological Society and the Zeitschrift fur Anthropologie in the years 1891-1899. The writings of this remarkable traveller present many difficulties. He was ignorant of the tribal dialects and worked by the aid of Malay interpreters ; he was not careful to note the sources from which and the localities where he obtained his information ; he failed to grasp the ethnological distinction between the various tribes ; and, lastly, his Gilberiian style of after-dinner talk threw much suspicion on the value of his work. Mr. Skeat, in his anxious desire to do the fullest justice to the writings of his predecessors, has perhaps wasted space in reproducing many of his statements and criticising his conclusions. In particular, his so-called " Flower " theory of the origin of Negrito decoration has been shown to be based upon a series of misunderstandings. The native term tor a " pattern " was misinterpreted by him to mean " flower " ; and