Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/583

Rh "The Body that Deserted the Stomach" (p. 136) is a version of the tale of the belly and the members told to the mutinous citizens in Coriolanus, and "The Melon and the Professor" (p. 203) is a version of a well-known tale in which a fig, falling on the professor's nose, makes him recant his opinion that the melon should grow on the strong fig-tree and not on the feeble ground-vine.

Father Wieger's Folk-lore Chinois Moderne contains 222 extracts from Chinese works of the eighth to the nineteenth century, printed side by side with French translations, an introduction, and brief notes, so that the sinologue is put into possession of original materials from named sources, while the folklorist with no knowledge of Chinese makes acquaintance for the first time with many passages which throw light on the incoherent and often contradictory welter of Chinese popular beliefs. Numerous narratives illustrate, in a peculiarly matter-of-fact style, the co-ordination and co-operation of the upper and lower worlds of the living and the dead,—(the resemblance of which extends even to the venality of officials),—the wandering condition of souls who have left life before their time, by suicide or accident, and can only escape by tempting living souls to take their place, and other matters already familiar to the student. But there is much fresher matter. For example, supernatural power and life, usually malevolent, are attained at great age by any object, even such as a chessman, a broom, a bolster, or an old rope rotting in a lake, but more especially by objects laid in tombs; by magic the soul or any part of one body can be exchanged for the corresponding soul or part of another body; the koei or malevolent defunct fear a broom made in rod form, and ginger revives those whom they have stricken with terror; the souls of men devoured by a tiger serve it as slaves, (p. 123); a single bone of one member of a family, secretly buried in a locality of fortunate fêngshui, say the cemetery of another family, will conduct the favourable influence to its own family, (p. 264.); animals digging burrows or living in holes have supernatural powers, because they overhear something of what passes in the lower world; dog's blood breaks all charms; and haunting foxes are driven off by hunters' guns after they have successfully defied exorcism