Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/440

 4o8 Short Notices.

Sacrifice; Prayer; the World of the Dead j Religion and Progress. There is little novelty in the exposition, but the book is well arranged and interesting. The following passage gives his views on Idolatry:

"The idol of stone and wood has been fiercely castigated by the devotees of the higher religions. But if they had been made aware of the real and wholesome service rendered by the idol, of the assistance it lent benighted peoples to gain a clearer understanding, and a more genuine appreciation of the personal properties of the being whom they worshipped, their onslaught on idolatry would have been less severe, and they would have been rather disposed to be sympathetic. If the idol has the effect of limituig and debasing the transcendent qualities of the deity, his spirituality, his ineffable might, it had its compensating uses in that it brought him nearer to the worshipper and made him a more intelligible being" (p. 37).

The Khasis. By Lt.-Col. P. R. T. Gurdon, C.S.I., Commissioner of the Assam Valley Districts and Honorary Director of Ethnography in Assam. Second edition. Pp. xxiv+232. Demy 8vo. London: Macmillan & Co. 1914. Price los.

The first edition of this excellent monograph, descriptive of an interesting tribe, was published in 1907, and was fully reviewed in these pages. ^ It is now reprinted in its original form^ with some new illustrations. The. statistics have been brought up to date according to the census of 191 1. It is to be regretted that the opportunity of a reprint has not been taken to reconstruct the bibliograpliy according to scientific methods, and it might have been expected that further study of the tribe would have added more material. But even as it stands the book is of high value, and the account of the erection of memorial stones in honour of dead is of considerable interest for the study of megalithic monu- ments in other parts of the world.

^ Folk- Lore, vol. xviii., p. 2i,0 et seqq.

Books for Rcvieiu should be addressed to The Editor of Folk-Lore, c/o Messrs. Sidgwick & Jackson, Adam St., Adelphi, London, W.C