Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/281

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fuller notes are also required for the elucidation of Bushman customs and modes of thought. Miss Lloyd is probably the only living person who can explain them. I have looked in vain for any account of Birth Rites, Marriage Customs, the super- stitions connected with Death and the Dead, Family relationships, Taboos, and so forth, on which our information is lamentably vague. May I appeal to Miss Lloyd to publish translations of the remaining texts, and to illustrate them with notes on these important subjects? This would be to render the utmost service to anthropological science. Few peoples in the world are in so nearly primitive a condition as the Bushmen ; and with the present generation they will to all intents and purposes have passed away. It is therefore urgent to put on record whatever may be known about them ; all the more urgent, since the knowledge is in the possession of so few of the white race.

The Bushman mythology, as represented by the stories here> is concerned chiefly with animals, with the heavenly bodies, and with the men of an early race s lid to have preceded the Bushmen in the occupation of the land. The legends concerning the early race are very obscure. We are reminded of the Alcheringa ancestors of the Arunta. It does not indeed appear that the early race were progenitors of the Bushmen. They are sufficiently modern, according to Miss Lloyd's Report of 1889, to be con- temporary with the Korannas. Their deeds are indistinguishable from those of the Bushmen ; nor, so far as I have discovered, is there any account of how they ceased to exist. The suspicion, therefore, is aroused that the expression " the early race " merely covers the Alcheringa ancestors (if I may use the phrase) of the present Bushmen. This is a question on which Miss Lloyd may be able to throw some light.

Of animal tales some of the myths of the mantis have been published elsewhere ; but they are here in authoritative form. The myths of the ant-eater have been reserved for the present. They are perhaps as valuable as those of the mantis. I am not sure whether they may not be even more illuminating, since it appears from Dr. Bleek's Report of 1875 that the ant-eater legislated (at least for the lower animals) on food, marriage, and other habits. Hints of totemism are hardly discoverable elsewhere ; they may