Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/416

 380 Reviews.

certain as a matter of fact that they have been borrowers in one particular respect, and that a most important respect when we are considering the possibility that they may have borrowed ideas, conceptions, tales, and myths. " It is a very remarkable fact," Father Schmidt says, " that most pygmy tribes seem to have no language of their own, but to speak the language of their bigger neighbours. That is the case with the Philippine Negritos, the Semang, and all the Central African pygmy tribes as yet known to us. It is, however, further to be noted that the language often is not that spoken at the present time by their bigger neighbours, but an older form." Thus, as most pygmy tribes have borrowed the language of their neighbours, we have to face the possibility that they may have borrowed in some cases not only the words but the ideas conveyed by the words. When, then, we find that in East Africa and in West Africa the names current amongst the pygmies for a Supreme Being, Waka and Nzambi, have been borrowed from the language of their bigger neighbours, there is the possibility that not only the name, but the idea also, has been borrowed by the pygmies ; and though, of course, difference ot language does not prevent folk-tales and myths from being borrowed, as all students of folklore know, still such borrowing would be yet easier, when the intercourse between two tribes was so close that the words and ideas of the one tribe were imposed upon the other.

It seems hazardous then to suppose that the religion of the pygmies in the twentieth century a.d. affords us much light on the religious views of pygmy man in the Quaternary period. Some, if not all, of the pygmies have learnt a new language since that period : and they may possibly have learnt therewith some new ideas.

F. B. Jevons.

Les Chretientes Celtiques. Par Dom Louis Gougaud. Paris: Bibl. de I'enseignement de I'hist. eccles., 191 1. 8vo, pp. xxxvi + 410.

Dom Louis Gougaud's Chritientes Celtiques is a work which bears testimony to the great amount of fresh material that has