Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/293

 before us contain a great mass of fascinating narratives of exploration, adventure, and archaeology, and it is to be hoped that an abridged edition at a popular price will be issued later to interest the general public in Sir Marc Stein's remarkable discoveries.

unassuming little book, by a missionary's daughter who has lived for many years in Zululand, gives in a simple and interesting manner accounts of weddings, burials, feasts, and many other matters, and concrete, and therefore valuable, examples of the working of such native customs as slaying twins, "sending home" the aged, and sacrificing to spirits. There are also accounts of the inkata or palladium of a tribe, of the weeping of the girls on the day of the Heavenly Princess, a specimen of the mazes drawn on the ground, etc., etc. Miss Samuelson's book is worth a place in every folklore library.

volume is not what might be expected from its title,—a study of the myths of Rhea, Cybele, etc.,—but its interest is for the seeker after the curious. It suggests that in the Land of Woe (Poland) arose the beginnings of civilization and the Primitive Empire, to which "refer all cosmogonies, all the myths, mythologies, and mythical conditions of humanity." Yggdrasil is " neither the tree of knowledge nor the tree of life, but only the genealogical tree"; Heimdall is the patriarch Noah; amulet "means the sign A, or in Lithuanian, the clover"; and so on.