Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/287

Rh floating on the forward-streaming river of men's thoughts, as do questions like the Esthonian, "Who runs without feet, pulls without hands, shrieks without a throat, and groans without pain?" (the wind), or the Lincolnshire, "Flies high, lights low, wears shoes and has none?" (a football). Popular stories, songs, and proverbs also yield him examples, and he supplies many instances of those collocations of words which are, as children say, intended "to catch one's tongue in a link." Specimens from Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and Bulgaria are quoted, but the English "a lump of red leather, a red leather lump," does not appear among them, neither do the lines relating to the thickwood thatchers, nor those which speak of the brave maids who braided straw braids. Several examples of chiapparelli, or "catches," are given, and an essay on Italian and Sicilian riddles concludes this valuable and careful treatise, which, with the collection of riddles accompanying it, must represent a vast amount of labour and patient research.

peculiar marsupial and other forms of animal life which characterise not only the present but the remote geological past of the Australian Continent, would lead us to suppose that the Australian savage may also have had an origin and development all his own. Not only may man have here arisen independently of the human species elsewhere, but his habits and civilisation, such as it is, have been very little or not at all modified by intermixture with men from other parts of the world. Perhaps until the white settlers arrived the Australian black had lived in isolation for tens of thousands of years, and therefore presents us with the purest form of primitive man that we can hope to find upon our earth. Hence the great importance of such a study as the book before us contains. The writer, when a student at Oxford, was known as an able, if not very industrious, student of biology; and was a pupil of Professor Ray Lancaster. Now a trained biologist, if you set him to observe primitive races, becomes at once an anthropologist and ethnologist of the best kind. His