Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/413

 Reviezus. 387

relevant phenomena of Australia, the Torres Straits Islands, New Guinea, and Melanesia, a wide region full of varied and typical forms of savage life. What, perhaps, at first sight impresses us most is the remarkable monotony of the subject-matter, due to the close similarity in belief and funeral rites prevalent among so many societies far removed from each other. This monotony, which will probably be fell all the more strongly when the other volumes have come to light, is relieved by Dr. Frazer's clear and pleasant style, with its occasional humour and archness, and in any case would not repel the scientific reader. For it is a fact of high value for the general anthropologist that certain phenomena such as death, excite the same or similar feelings in the greater part of mankind, and that similarity of feeling suggests identical rites and customs. Also this prevailing monotony adds interest to the occasional and not unimportant diversities, which attest free thought and possibilities of progress.

It is not the object of this notice to question or to criticise the value or the authenticity of the sources from which Dr. Frazer draws. He himself is sufficiently careful in this matter, and the width of his reading fills us with wonder. Yet the investigator of a special field generally finds something to correct in the work of his predecessor. And our author might have dealt differently with the Fijian Kalou, a term which he interprets as "god" (p. 440), if he had read Mr. Hocart's excellent article in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute for 191 2. But the question of Qiiellen-Kritik will be most urgent when he comes to deal with the ancient advanced societies of the Mediterranean area. Here an easy-going and uncritical acceptance of all ancient authorities would be fatal. And this hint may not be untimely, in view of Dr. Frazer's statement on p. 159, "Every year the Pelo- ponnesian lads lashed themselves on the grave of Pelops at Olympia, till the blood ran down their backs as a libation in honour of the dead man " ; a rite which he compares with funeral mutilation in Western Australia. The Australian record is true : the Greek is entirely bogus, being one of the latest and most ignorant of the generally admirable and ancient scholia on Pindar, the invention probably of a late Byzantine scholiast who could not understand the word al/iaKovpia, but remembered the