Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/196

 172 Reviews.

dealing with two different tribes. But the reader would not have been thus tripped up had the work been arranged according to tribes or districts, instead of being arranged under the general headings IMarriage, Disposal of the Dead, &c. Mr. Ling Roth's difficulty, of course, lay in the carelessness or imperfect infor- mation of the travellers and others whose reports he is following or quoting, and who often do not accurately specify the tribes of which they are speaking. He has, no doubt, adopted his division of chapters deliberately, and perhaps it is the best his materials permitted. But it points to a defect in the evidence which puzzles and annoys anthropologists in the accounts brought home of peoples all over the world, and which renders those accounts too frequently a hopeless muddle.

Unfortunately, valuable as are the reports collected in these volumes, our travellers, administrators, and missionaries have never made a study of any of the native customs and beliefs (with the doubtful exception of Archdeacon Perham's articles on the Sea-Dyak Gods, reprinted here from l\v& Journal of the Straits Asiatic Society) equal to the careful studies of Grabowsky on the inhabitants of Dutch Borneo. Consequendy, in order thoroughly to understand the Bornean peoples, we must have recourse also to the latter source. For example, it is impossible from the fragmentary accounts which Mr. Ling Roth has been able to bring together to form a connected conception of Dyak ideas of the spirit-world. To do this we must turn to Grabowsky's great monograph on " Death, Burial, the Tiwah or Feast of the Dead, and the ideas of the Dyaks on the Otherworld," in the second volume of the Internationales Archiv fiir EtJmographie. But this is not Mr. Ling Roth's fault. It is due partly to the decay among the British subjects of their original beliefs and practices, and partly and still more to the incomplete character of the reports, which are the only material he has had to embody.

Neither pains nor expense have been spared in the production of these volumes. The number of copies is limited, and they cannot be reproduced. For the study of a most interesting popu- lation undergoing change in all its habits and modes of thought by contact with Malays, Chinese, and Europeans, and hence in a stage of great importance to the student, it is hard to overestimate the work done by the compiler. If his example induced other students to go and do likewise, the gain to science would be enormous.