Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/143

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based upon the chords of the tonic, dominant and sub-dominant. The cadences are distinctly modern-sounding, and many of the tunes have the irritating habit, common to German popular airs, of ending on the third of scale. These various melodic points at once suggest that the songs have been " sung in parts," and from Herr Grosimund's preface we learn that most of the songs in his collection actually were sung in two-part or three-part harmony. There is no trace of real antiquity in the airs, nor are any of them modal or suggestive of having been influenced by old church- music. A similar absence of noble flowing melody, scale-variety, and originality is noticeable in five other volumes of Swiss folk- songs issued by the S.G. fur Volkskunde, for, with a very few exceptions, the airs are modelled on the pattern of trifling modern German part-songs and the more recent form oi Jodler. This is the more striking, seeing that the words of many of the songs wedded to this indifferent music are of uncommon beauty and charm.

Lucy E. Broadwood.

The Yellow and Dark-Skinned People of Africa South OF THE Zambesi : a Description of the Bushmen, the Hottentots, and particularly the Bantu, with Fifteen Plates and Numerous Folklore Tales of these diff'erent People. By George M'Call Theal. Swan Sonnenschein, 19 10. 8vo, pp. xvi 4-397.

Dr. Theal's various works on the history of South Africa have earned him the lasting gratitude of every student whether of the evolution of the empire or of anthropology. His labours have been crowned by the completion of his monumental History. Many persons, however, who are interested more particularly in the native races have not the leisure to search the pages of that great book in pursuit of the information they require. It was therefore an excellent idea to gather into a separate volume the scattered chapters on the Bushmen, the Hottentots, and the Bantu, and to incorporate further details which would have been irrelevant or at