Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/537

 REVIEWS.

Marriage Ceremonies in Morocco. By Edward Wester- MARCK. 8vo. Pp. xii + 422. 12s.net. London : Macmillan is: Co. 1 914. Ceremonies and Beliefs connected with Agriculture, Certain Dates of the Solar Year, and the Weather in Morocco. By Edward Westermarck. 8vo. Pp. viii+143. Helsingfors, Akademiska Bokhandeln. 1913.

In these two books Professor Westermarck has published some of the material collected by him during sixteen journeys to Morocco. They are the result of careful, systematical field work conducted under scientific methods, and .they furnish a large collection of facts of the highest interest to students of anthropology and folklore.

The first book, he tells us, is meant to be "a kind of apology for a serious omission of which I was guilty when I wrote my History of Human Marriage over twenty years ago/' :_the neglect to discuss wedding ceremonies, and the failure to recognise their magical significance, a principle emphasized byjMr. E. Crawley in his Mystic Rose, and by Sir J. Frazer. The scheme of the book is to describe the tribal customs connected with betrothal, the trousseau, the preliminary rites at the house of the bride and bridegroom, the fetching, arrival, and reception of the bride, the meeting of the wedded pair, the final observances and taboos of marriage. With our present knowledge, it is impossible to ascer- tain the ultimate origin of these observances : some may have been imported, some may be of spontaneous growth. " Consider- ing how often absolutely identical customs are found among races living in very different parts of the world, under circumstances which exclude all possibility of a common origin, ''wejhave to take