Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/301

 Reviews. 277

the Society from Mr. Stuart-Glennie's paper in the Trafisactions of the Interfiational Folklore Congress of 1891, and these col- lections may be taken as supplementing the Excursus to the Women of Turkey. In these essays, particularly in the second, questions are raised of great importance and wide bearing, which it will be impossible here to do more than touch upon. Mr. Stuart-Glennie has some novel and startling theories to bring for- ward ; and it may be said at once, that while to prove them would need far more evidence than he brings forward, they are by no means on that account to be dismissed as untrue. He finds fault with current theories as being inadequate to cover all the facts of history, and as being often inconsistent. He proposes to go back to first principles, and to find out what is the origin (i) of social development and (2) of progressive philosophic thought. The former he finds in a conflict of higher races with lower, and not in a spontaneous growth out of savagery ; the latter is a conflict between higher and lower conceptions. Certain "primary civiUsa- tions " (whose origin, by the way, the editor does not inquire into), are postulated, which gradually tamed and civiUsed the wilder races that filled the rest of the world. He finds a reminiscence of this period in stories of the Swan-maiden type, where a man sees a woman of surpassing beauty and power, weds her, follows her to her own countrj', is there kept in subjection, and returns with new thoughts and aspirations. From alliances of this sort he would apparently derive the idea of women's power which suggested the Amazon legend. If we are not mistaken, he also connects with this the Matriarchate ; though we cannot follow him in explaining thus a custom so much more easily explicable from natural facts.

The wild man's thought of the civilised may have been the origin of tales in which occur giants and supernaturally powerful persons. That power and size are associated in the uncivilised mind is clear enough. The writer well remembers seeing in India many years ago a marionette show depicting the siege of Delhi, in which the European soldiers differed in size aci^ording to their rank, and the Rajah, if made to scale, towered hund^-eds of feet above his fortifications. The same thmg may be seen in the figures of Pharaohs on Egyptain bas-reliefs. At the same time, it must be remembered that the giants of folktales are generally outwitted and destroyed. Again, the transmission of