Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/266

244 an underground connection between the Caspian and Black Sea dates back the present-day belief of that locality; the importance attached to symmetrical astragali for divination and games is signified by the disproportionate attention paid by Aristotle to those bones in numerous animals; and many popular beliefs appear, such as that the drinking of certain waters by animals affected their colours or those of their offspring, that bleeding at particular points gave relief in diseases of such organs as the liver and spleen, that the nautilus spread its sail to 'catch a favouring gale,' and so on.

time had arrived when a book such as Mr. MacCulloch's Religion of the Ancient Celts had become, in a sense, inevitable. The large collection of folklore made, (to speak only of comparatively recent work), in Scotland by J. G. Campbell, Henderson, and indirectly by Alex. Carmichael in his collection of Gaelic charms and poems, in Ireland by Curtin, Wood-Martin, and Lady Wilde, and in Wales by Sir John Rhŷs; the similar work of Le Braz, Sébillot, and Luzel in Brittany; and the studies made by Alex. Bertrand, S. Reinach, Dottin, and Gaidoz in the religion of the ancient Gauls in France, awaited co-ordination for the general reader. Probably the work of bringing together and arranging a portion of this accumulated material could not have fallen into better hands than Mr. MacCulloch's. His articles in Hastings' Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics had carried him over a large part of the field, and his industry and sense of proportion have enabled him to compile out of the mass of material a useful and comprehensive book. It may be doubted whether we shall eventually be satisfied with any co-ordination which takes so much racial identity for granted as the throwing together of material from so many different sources implies; we shall certainly not eventually be satisfied with any survey which places in juxtaposition rites and customs derived from peoples in such various stages of cultural development as, for instance, the Gaul of