Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/438

 4o6 Revieivs.

quently need protection from evil spirits and other dangers {ibid.^ p. 71). Part III. includes a collection of proverbs and some folk-tales recorded in the tribal dialect with an English translation. ^V^ Crooke.

Psyche's Task: A Discourse Concerning the Influence of Superstition on the Growth of Institutions. By J. G. Frazer. Second edition, revised and enlarged. 8vo. Pp. viii+186. London : Macmillan & Co. 1913- Price5s.net.

This course of lectures, originally delivered before the Royal Institution, displays the wealth of anthropological knowledge and the beauty of style familiar to all readers of The Golden Bough. Its purpose is to show that while we are apt to think of superstition as an unmitigated evil, false in itself and pernicious in its conse- quences, it has a brighter side. This is summed up in four pro- positions : that among certain races and at certain times super- stition has strengthened the respect for government, private pro- perty, marriage, and human life. The first is illustrated by the belief that rulers have been regarded with superstitious awe as beings of a higher order and endowed with mightier powers than common folk ; the second by the system of taboo, superstitious fear deterring men from appropriating their neighbours' goods ; the third by the fact that sexual immorality is believed of itself to entail, naturally and inevitably, without the intervention of society, most serious consequences not only on the culprits themselves, but also on the community, whose very existence is menaced by the destruction of the food supply ; the fourth by the belief that the dread of the ghost operates in a twofold way to protect human life, by making every individual for his own sake more reluctant to slay his fellow, and by arousing the whole community to punish the slayer.

In this edition the question of avoidance between a man and his wife's relations, of which the taboo of the mother-in-law is the most familiar, is fully discussed, with the conclusion that it is probably a precaution against criminal intimacy, and incidentally, that there is a close connexion between the avoidance of the wife's relations and the dread of an infertile marriage.