Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/419

 Reviews. 393

queries, or to suggest any additions. Yet I would, with all diffi- dence, step in where others may fear to tread ; and my excuse for doing so is that, as I have read this book with its series of questions, I have imagined myself back in the wilds of Central Africa, with few books of reference and no means of ascertaining the meaning of some of the technicalities used, such as Keloids (called Peloids by others), etc. Most men of ordinary general knowledge know what anthropomorphic means, but the same cannot be said of phyto- morphic and hylomorphic, — (Chambers' Dictionary gives neither), — and the men for whom I presume this book to have been prepared have had no special training in the nomenclature of anthropology, and are often cut off for years from a good reference library. A little etymology would have been helpful not only to the definition of the words, but also in fixing their meaning in the worker's memory.

I notice that tlie colour of the eye (or the iris), of the skin, etc. is to be noted, and in my experience scarcely two men will call an intermediate shade by the same name. I felt this difficulty some years ago, when collecting fish for the Natural History Museum. They asked me to describe the colours on the fish directly they were taken from the water. Now, although I am not colour-blind in the slightest degree, yet, not having served my time in a millinery establishment matching shades of colour, my vocabulary respecting colours was that of an ordinary man, and to what I called by one name an expert. might have given a quite different name. I mentioned this difficulty, — a very real one, — and the authorities supplied me with a book of colours which was most helpful. I would, therefore, suggest that a page or two of the Notes should be devoted to examples of colours, with names or numbers to each, i.e. a page giving shades of colour for the iris, and another with the various tints of brown for the skin ; it would make for accuracy. The names and illustrations given in the book of patterns and designs of the principal geometrical motives, and of decorative art, are very useful, and will help the student to say accurately in a word or two what would otherwise demand a descriptive paragraph or a drawing. Something on the same lines for colours would standardise them, and we should all mean the same thing when we mentioned a shade of colour.

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