Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/282

256 stop, like Sir William MacGregor, to inquire into the customs and superstitions of the natives with whom he had to deal, or who would think they concerned him at all.

The work before us, the interest of which is quite out of proportion to its shortness, deals chiefly with superstitions; and many of the examples given are highly curious. Human sacrifice, ploughing round a commune as a precaution against epidemics, vampyres, talismans, are only a few of the subjects touched. When, however, the author comes to deal with the restlessness which is everywhere the consequence of a serious epidemic, we can no longer classify the cause with accuracy as superstition. It is rather terror leading to the entertainment of every species of credulity, and rising to the height of fury in the determination to put an end to all possibilities of infection. Superstition proper, of course, does enter into many of these terrors; but the term by no means covers the ground. In the town in which these words are written there is a strong anti-vaccination party, and popular feeling ran very high against the medical men during a recent epidemic of small-pox. One of the chief grievances against them was that they had some secret prophylactic against the disease—not vaccination, of course. And the entire vaccination-party was charged with poisoning the water, to produce small-pox! Fear and anger gave birth to this credulity even amongst intelligent men. At Maidstone, during the epidemic of typhoid fever, the effigy of the medical officer of health was burnt, in consequence of the sanitary measures on which he insisted. These manifestations of popular excitement, though strictly analogous to many described by M. Lowenstimm, can only be reckoned as superstition by an extension of the use of that term which is beyond the bounds of anything like scientific language.

The author himself, therefore, while intending to confine his inquiries to cases of superstition, finds his subject draw him over the boundary line. Not that this detracts in any way from the value of his book: it merely gives point to the contention that it is not enough for those who govern to study one department of national psychology; the whole must be surveyed, for difficulties arise in the most unlooked-for directions, difficulties with which it requires knowledge properly to grapple. Doubtless this is a council of perfection. It is well, however, to set up a high standard. Recent deplorable occurrences in India have been