Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/504

 45 8 Reviews.

of the " drum ecclesiastic." To-day, Dr. Driver, Regius Pro- fessor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, says that "there is not the smallest evidence that either Abraham or the other patriarchs ever actually existed," and not an episcopal voice is raised in protest ! Dr. Frazer's encyclopaedic knowledge and matchless skill in the comparative treatment of materials unite in illuminating some "dark sayings." For example, taking the incident of David and Abigail, when the beautiful widow, quick to find consolation in the amorous arms of the "gallant outlaw," tells him that his soul "shall be bound in the bundle of life with the Lord his God," Dr. Frazer detects the persistence of the barbaric idea of the separable soul among the Hebrews. The covenant on the cairn between Jacob and Laban suggests parallels from the Hebrides and Bengal ; and the wrestling of Jacob with the nameless stranger the wringing of some advantage from the " spirit or jinnee of the river," by whose banks the combatants struggled. Various fields of research are traversed by Mr. Hartland in the article on the sacrifice of female chastity in the temple of Mylitta, which, he doubtless knows, has modern example, as shown in Mr. Edgar Thurston's Ethnographic Notes, in certain parts of Southern India, where one girl from each family is set apart for such service, yet not losing caste ; by Professor Haddon, who. Dr. Lang may take note, testifies that the Torres Straits islanders " have no conception of a Supreme God " ; by Sir John Rhys, who identifies the "nine witches of Gloucester" with Goidelic sorceresses ; and by Dr. Westermarck, whose contribution on the "transference of conditional curses in Morocco " was, in the first instance, read before our Society.

But, more suitably adapting the word to the occasion, Dr. Lang leads off with an admirable and warm-hearted "appreciation," as the modern phrase has it, of the donee and his work. The period, from iS6i to the present year, which this covers, and the range of subjects, duly scheduled in an exhaustive bibliography, which it includes, will be a revelation even to some among us who know Primitive Culture " au fond." Of that book Dr. Lang speaks in no exaggerated terms when, in the words which Thucydides applied to his History,