Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/426

 390 Reviews.

with his Bay's mother. Here perhaps is the reason of the pro- hibition ; there is a milk-bond between the children.

As among other western Bantu, the taboos suggest a decayed totemism. If totemism were not found among Bantu elsewhere, they would be no more than a suggestion here ; and in any case little can be made of them. They rest upon villages, not upon families, and not even upon all villages, for some appear to be exempt, except in so far as taboos may be laid upon individuals by the priests and medicine-men. The taboo of animals is called Ikina Bart, and its object is said to be to teach men abstinence. Thus, if the Ikina of a man be the leopard, he may eat neither leopard nor any animal killed by a leopard. Sickness and death would result from infringement of the taboo. The Ikina, it will be seen, in some sense is sacred; yet no cult is rendered to it, and it may even be killed, for what sufficient reason we are not told. Formerly a man might not marry any woman who had the same Ikina Bari as himself. Presumably, therefore, he must have gone outside his own village for a wife. This prohibition, I gather, no longer holds. The wife now adopts the husband's Ikina^ and it descends to the children. The mother's Ikina continues to be observed by them, but only up to a certain point; and its observance does not transcend the limit of a single generation. The inheritance of the taboo in the male hne seems to be the result of the custom (which is, however, not without exception among these tribes) of taking the wife to the husband's home, and so in line with the usual development of Father-Right.

Space fails me to direct attention to all the points of interest to students of folklore. I have barely touched upon the Basongo Meno, to whom an important chapter is devoted. Nor is the material culture discussed with less care than the mental and moral culture and the organization of society. The houses, the art, the methods of hunting and fishing, the agriculture, and the adornment of the body, (including tattooing, cicatrization, and the depilation of eyebrows), all come under review, and are profusely illustrated with cuts in the text and plates. The plates, which are of great beauty, are, so far as regards the illustrations of the native form, costumes, and house interiors, from the pencil of Mr. Norman Hardy. Acknowledgement is made of Mrs. Joyce's