Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/78

 REVIEWS.

work is published from the manuscripts of the late Dr. Rand. Some of the legends had been previously published by Dr. Rand in his lifetime; and Mr. Leland used his manuscripts in preparing The Algonquin Legends of New England, where students first made the acquaintance of the Micmac hero Glooscap. The entire collection now appears, edited by Miss Helen L. Webster, and published under the direction of the Department of Comparative Philology, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, in whose library Dr. Rand's manuscripts have been placed by Professor E. N. Horsford, who purchased them after the writer's death.

Of the genuineness of the traditions here gathered together there is no doubt, but for scientific purposes their presentation leaves something to be desired. Dr. Rand, of whose interesting life a sketch is presented in the Introduction, had his own ideas on the subject of translation. The idiom of the American aboriginal tongues is so utterly different from ours, that any approach to a literal version would have been impossible. But Dr. Rand paraphrases and interpolates comments—in a word, tells the stories, as he says, in his own way; and it is a way that cannot be commended for imitation. Take, for instance, the following passage in a variant of a well-known story —

"Night overtook them, and they lay down in the forest under the open sky to sleep. The atmosphere was clear.