Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/230

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learned and skilful he may be, should overlook difficulties that occur to more detached fellow-students. It remains to test alike Dr. Rivers' principles and his conclusions by applying them to other cultures. For some of them at all events vve need have no fear of any such tests. Among such we may note, as one of the most striking and satisfactory results of his researches, the rehabili- tation of Morgan's theory that terms of relationship express real kinship, and are not empty terms of address. Dr. Rivers had put this forward in his lecture on Kinship arid Social Organization, and has now worked it out more fully. Indeed the argument of the present work is based upon the correctness of the hypothesis. As a pioneer, of course, Morgan fell into many errors of detail: but he grasped the central truth which makes his work of permanent value. The so-called " classificatory system" is founded on the clan, and thus is brought into line with the conclusions of a school of anthropology which it is now the fashion to depreciate. It is only too probable that those conclusions, as research progresses, will have to be modified in various particulars. Many of them were doubtless too hasty; they were based on unwarranted generalizations. But on the whole they seem likely to stand firm against objections based on a narrower outlook and more impatient inferences.

The descriptive volume contains a number of excellent illustra- tions, both in the text and as separate plates, many of them from Dr. Rivers' own photographs.

E. Sidney Hartland.

Zeus, a Study of Ancient Religion. By Arthur Bernard Cook. Vol. I. : Zeus of the Bright Sky. Cambridge, at the University Press. 1914. Medium 8vo, pp. xliii-f 885.

The x^siatic Dionysos. By Gladys M. N. Davis. Pp. x+ 276. London, G. Bell & Sons, Ltd. 19 14.

]\Ir. Cook's great monograph on Zeus, of which only the first volume has as yet been published, will have special interest to our Society, because some of the preliminary studies on which