Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/75

Rh which I must reserve for a time of greater leisure. All I have attempted to present is a primâ facie case for regarding the matter as still open, notwithstanding M. Beéier's bulky volume. But I cannot part from it for the present without expressing my admiration, no less for the form than for the matter of his disquisitions. He has managed to give to his closely-reasoned arguments all the attraction of a well-developed plot, and he has approached his subject armed with all the resources of French erudition, and no inconsiderable amount of folklore learning. One almost regrets to hear that he is henceforth devoting his powers to Arthurian romance; one would have liked to have the whole case against the Transmissionist theory presented by an adversary so well armed as M. Bédier on a field of battle somewhat less contracted than that of the Fabliaux.

is a missionary in South Africa; and this excellent little book is the result of daily intercourse with them. He has used all care in collecting; writing the stories from dictation, and correcting each afterwards with the aid of his informers, "old people principally" (p. iv). In this way more than seventy tales have been got together; and of these, he has here published 23 of the most interesting, all previously unedited. He has added notes explanatory of anything obscure, thus touching on cannibalism (71), the circumcision of both sexes (130), animal clans (132), corn and bread (136), son of chief succeeding while the father yet lives (164), divination by knucklebones (228), and other matters of lore and custom. Some of the tales are interspersed with verses, which he thinks are often the kernel around which the tale has grown up (p. x); which is interesting as bearing upon other collections, such as the Jātaka, where there is good reason for holding the same view. The preface gives an account of the ethnology of the Basuto; and an appendix contains a bibliography of this and other connected tribes in South Africa.