Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/428

404 support of his contention that totemism is originally connected with the communities reckoning descent through females. The facts and information brought forward by the author give his work interest and value, although his interpretations may not always be justifiable. For example, he implicitly cites stories of supernatural birth as in favour of descent exclusively through the mother, although the uncertainty of paternity cannot be the reason for it; and he accepts the ceremonial capture of wives as a survival from actual capture, and associates it with a community tracing descent in the female line. He gives no sufficient reason to treat inheritance from a step-mother by a son as a survival of mother-right, etc. These two volumes are "only prior communications to a more extensive work that will be devoted by the author to the problem of mother-right and matriarchate in Eastern and Central Asia." The results already achieved by the author inspire the hope that his future work may be a valuable contribution to the comparatively scanty Russian literature dealing with folklore problems.

In the earlier stages of folklore study in Russia attention was given chiefly from the literary side, and to songs, tales, proverbs, etc. Hence, being thus associated with studies of the literature of the people, folklore does not constitute in Russia an independent branch of research. The efforts to collect folklore material date from the seventeenth century, but the first synthetic and general works appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century, when scientific methods of investigation were adopted by Prof Th. Buslayev, the leader of the mythological school in Russia, who applied theories of comparative philology to explain the phenomena of Old Slavonic, and suggested the meteorological method of interpreting myths. In the thirties and forties of last century the endeavours of several Russian scholars who had been engaged in the work of collecting and studying the antiquities of the Russian people, were united by the foundation of the "Archeographical Commission" (1834), and the "Russian Geographical Society" (1846), who have carried on ever since very active work of research and publishing. A new impulse to the