Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/503

 Reviews. 457

Anthropological Essays presented to Edward Burnett Tylor in honour of his 75th Birthday, 2nd October, 1907. Edited by Northcote W. Thomas. Oxiord : at the Clarendon Press. 15s. net.

The miscellaneous contents of this unique and stately volume, albeit linked by the unity of a common pursuit, can have adequate treatment only at the hands of a syndicate of reviewers. No ordinary critic "is sufficient for these things," because, apart from pronouncements on the merits of the several papers, the divergent theories enunciated in more than one of them call for the deliverance of judgments which can carry no weight save from experts.

It was a happy thought to make Dr. Tylor's seventy-fifth birthday the occasion of recognition of his immense services to anthropology, a recognition wisely rejecting the stereotyped testimonials in useless bric-a-brac, and taking the form of contributions on the line of his own researches from some of the more prominent students of the science.

Twenty of these discourse on divers matters which each, more or less, has made his own. Hence, Dr. Lang discusses Australian marriage and totem problems ; Mr. Thomas (to whose capable hands " the actual work " of seeing the book through the press has been entrusted by the Editorial Committee), cognate questions ; while Mr. Rivers pursues the origin of classificatory systems of relationships already illustrated in his monograph on the Todas; and Professor Ridgeway sum- marizes the evidence as to the lUyrian origin of the Dorians.

The variety of the articles, as well as the limits of our space, alike make detailed reference impossible. But a few words may be written about one or more contributions, notably on that by Dr. Frazer on " Folk-lore in the Old Testament," to which the attractiveness of both author and subject will secure pro- minence. A generation back such a theme would have been tabooed, and its selection shows how far and fast we have moved. When, in his History of the Jews, Dean Milman, illustrating nomadic conditions, spoke of Abraham as " an Arab sheik," the impiety of the comparison caused loud beating

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