Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/289

Rh never been opportunity to measure them. Among the Tîyyans are to be seen government officers of position and vakils, while the Chovan women wear a skirt of grass.

The mantras which are given on pp. 166, 167, and the tables of predictions on pp. 203 etc., of good or bad fortune following pubescence on certain days, according to months, weeks, and period of the lunar asterism when the symptoms were first observed, are interesting. So, too, is it that at the tâli-tying ceremony, symbolic of marriage, the parties of the Kammâlan bride and of the bridegroom vie with each other in singing indecent songs. The book is distinctly interesting, but it is not a very safe guide.

it is neither necessary nor permissible here to deal with most of the matter contained in the eleven hundred and odd pages of these two splendidly illustrated volumes. Any review must be swollen to inordinate length by more than a casual notice of the geographical explorations and surveys during two years and a half in Chinese Turkestan and Kansu; of the moving tale of adventures amidst cowardly Chinese and truculent Turki mutineers, and in crossing the thirsty Sea of Sand, scrambling through well-nigh impassable river gorges, and finally wading thigh-deep through snows which crippled the author with frostbite; and of the archælogical and artistic investigations which continued and extended for nearly a thousand miles eastwards those detailed in the two magnificent volumes of Ancient Khotan.

Greek arts and ideas of classical times were spread in many ways of war and peace from the west of Europe to the centre of Asia. The ships of Sennacherib bore Greek sailors down the