Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/85

Rh the end. It is a pity that the stories were not also numbered in the text. No parallels are given, and no introductions, except a short preface describing the work as a whole.

his introductory chapter Dr. Jevons claims, with characteristic modesty, no more than that his intention is to collect together for the student the principal results of recent anthropological investigations, so far as they relate to religious customs and institutions, and "to familiarise him with some of the elementary ideas and some of the commonest topics" of the History of Religion, so as "to prepare him for the study of that history." It need not be said that the author fulfils the intention thus expressed. He does a vast deal more. Taking up the investigation of the evolution of religion where the late Professor Robertson Smith dropped it, and partly availing himself of, and partly controverting, the conclusions of Mr. Frazer, he enquires on the one hand what preceded totemism in the religious development of the race, and on the other hand how and whence the higher polytheism of the pagan nations and the monotheism of the Hebrews were evolved. The result is a book of absorbing interest, every chapter of which is alive with new and fruitful hypotheses, which must form the basis of future inquiries.

To criticise it is an exceedingly difficult task. Not merely is it hard to get far enough away to survey it as a whole, but to follow it into details demands a knowledge as accurate and minute as the author's own; and that is what very few possess. Here we make no pretensions to anything more than such a notice of a few of the points raised in the course of the book as will enable readers to form an idea of its importance as a contribution to anthropological science.

Dr. Jevons begins by distinguishing between the natural and supernatural as conceived by primitive man, contending, as we understand, that whatever baffled the expectations and the efforts of man was recognised as supernatural, and that the distinction was clear and sharp from the first. Magic was, the primitive man