Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/117

 Revieivs. 107

Essays and Studies presented to William Ridgeway on HIS Sixtieth Birthday, 6th August, 191 3. Edited by E. C. QuiGGiN. Cambridge University Press. 19 13. 25s. net.

The number and variety of these essays contained in this volume testify to the wide range of Prof. Ridgeway's intellectual activity, which indeed surveys mankind from China to Peru. Classical archaeology and textual criticism, Quetzalcoatl or the thorough-bred horse, Byzantine inscriptions or the Mandible of Man, nothing comes amiss. The reviewer of such a volume feels himself to be a fraud; he can only look with awe and take a taste here and there according to his poor capacity. Our readers will have to be contented with a few notes on the topics that specially concern us.

There is a note of uncertainty in Miss Harrison and Mr. Gow which is unlike the usual professorial attitude. Miss Harrison gives us a number of suggestions as to St'a X'ldov versus Sta \lQov and then declares that she cannot decide : Mr. Gow finds two jars in the story of Pandora, but leaves us without our cAttis that we have got to the bottom of either. Indeed, he tells us that when we have e'A-t's safely shut up in the jar, this means that we have not got her at all. Mr. Bosanquet on "Two Axes and a Spear " has something to say to the ethnologist ; so have Mr. Balfour on " Kite-fishing," Mr. Myers on the " Beginning of Music," Mr. Haddon on " Outrigger Canoes," Mr. Duckworth on the " Gallery Hill Skeleton," Mr. Thurston on the " Number Seven." I wish some one would investigate the number Three and its connexion with singular, dual, and plural. Sir J. G. Frazer has a charming paper on the "Serpent and the Tree of Life," in which he reconstructs an alternative story for that of the book of Genesis. Mr. S. A. Cook deals briefly with an important question in his "Evolution of Primitive Thought," which, like the last paper, touches on the Old Testament. Another difticult and important subject is INIr. Rivers's "Contact of Peoples": he indicates that the source of influence by people- on people is a superiority of material culture. Mr. Godley, in his witty verses that open the book, says " While Ridgeway lives, research can