Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/551

 Rh to suggest a better. One of the most interesting sections of this treatise is that on serfdom, and it recognises the influence of race traditions in determining some points in the history of Japanese serfdom. We are glad to observe that an influential committee on ethnography has been formed by the Asiatic Society of Japan, who have already issued a code of questions relative to local institutions, the answers to which, if properly gathered, should prove of the utmost value. We hope to hear more of Mr. Wigmore's Japanese researches, and we should like to see his code extended to other yet unexamined countries under the sway of the Asiatic Society.

Mr. Ashley has done good service in editing Fustel de Coulanges' treatise. All that this distinguished scholar wrote is worth preserving. He disposes of the "mark theory" in Teutonic institutions, but Mr. Ashley seems to think that this act of destruction, very necessary we admit to the proper study of institutions, is to be identified with an act of construction whereby the old theory of Roman origins is once more advanced. Mr. Ashley is angry with Professor Rhys for suggesting that philological evidence proves the late survival of a non-Aryan race of people; he is contemptuous about my own researches to prove the survival of non-Aryan elements in English village institutions. But, with the "mark theory" cleared out of the way, it is not too much to assert that room has been made for the pre-Celtic theory, if I may so term it. Fustel de Coulanges could see no history outside the evidence of documents. The leges barbarorum were to him the basis and superstructure of his work. But there is danger in this limitation. For instance, in criticising Von Maurer, M. Fustel de Coulanges lays too much stress upon the term and status of "tenant". What were these tenants? Something more, most certainly, than the lawyers' conception of them would enable us to determine. Tenants they may have been, because of the over-lord imposed upon