Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/575

 Reviews. 5 1 1

of the rites do not for the moment interest him. It is in their sequence that he finds their significance. He contends that the rites named on the title-page, as repeated at the head of this notice, are rites intended to mark and to facilitate the passage of the individual or the community from one condition to another, from one stage of life to another; and that they essentially consist of three kinds : — rites of separation, marginal rites, and rites of aggregation. By their means separation is effected from the old condition, the old community, and union is entered into with the new.

The principle of this analysis was originally applied ten years ago in an article by Messrs. Hubert and Mauss on the Nature and Function of Sacrifice, which appeared in L^Amiee Sociologique for 1899. M. van Gennep's merit is to have seen that it is a principle of wider application, and to have sketched its function in relation to many other classes of rites. He has produced a book of much interest to students. That it contains many acute observations we hardly need say.^ It will facilitate the process of research by indicating to workers in the field the necessity of looking out for these sequences and paying attention to their details, and by clarifying the ideas of students at home on the relation of form to meaning as displayed in the relation of the different members of a series of rites which may extend even over a lengthened period of time.

E. Sidney Hartland.

The Jew and Human Sacrifice. [Human Blood and Jewish Ritual.] An Historical and Sociological Inquiry. By Hermann L. Strack, D.D., Ph.D. Translated from the eighth edition by H. F. E. Blanchamp. Cope and Fenwick, 1909. Pp. xviii + 289.

Prof. Strack, a Christian professor of theology and at the same time a profound scholar, undertook in 1892, and has continued

^ The criticism of Mr. Crawley's theory of marriage by capture in relation to sexual solidarity on p. 179, and the insistence on distinction between physiological and social puberty are noteworthy examples.