Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/562

526 from modern sources, are invertebrate and not always comprehensible to a stranger to Malabar. The author tells one interesting fact: that Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva are jointly worshipped in a temple on Manukunnu. Of course the real jungle folk would take no interest in this shrine. Wynad is, by the by, remarkably full of antiquities, of which the book tells nothing.

{{hi|{{sc|The Tribe and Intertribal Relations in Australia.}} By {{sc|Gerald C. Wheeler}}. With a Prefatory Note by {{sc|Edward A. Westermarck}}. John Murray, 19 10. 8vo, pp. xii+168.

{{sc|This}} little book is intended to be "the first in a series of sociological works published in connection with the Martin White benefaction at the University of London." Thus Professor Westermarck concludes the Prefatory Note with which he introduces the volume his teachings have inspired. It is to be hoped that it may prove the forerunner of many similar monographs; for in anthropology there is perhaps no more urgent need at the present moment than the study of related groups of men apart from other groups, with the object of gathering into one focus all that we know about their social institutions, their customs, and ideas. By this means alone can a firm foundation be laid for comparison, for the extrication of principles which govern the development of civilization, and for the sound exposition of the meaning of practices superficially alike, but often starting from very different motives.

Mr. Wheeler has chosen a subject admirably calculated to illustrate the beginnings of social organization. The Australian tribes, thinly scattered over an immense area, for the most part unfavourable to any large population, though yielding to small groups a sufficient supply of the most elementary wants of life, moreover, being themselves, roughly speaking, homogeneous and lacking the impetus of contact with foreign ideas, organization, and material civilization of a kind and degree that they could assimilate, have remained for ages untold in a condition almost