Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/289

Rh Chapter XI.—Disease, Accident, Death, Cannibalism.

Chapter XII.—Rain-making, Thunder and Lightning-making.

Chapter XIII.—Ethno-Pornography.

These chapters fill 200 pages, and are followed by as many as 436 woodcuts illustrative of the text, and often coloured.

It is difficult to prefer one chapter to another of a work so modestly written, yet so crammed with carefully observed facts. But I think the chapters on language will be most attractive to most people. Of the manual or gesture language Mr. Roth gives as many as 213 diagrams, showing the position and movement of the hands in the communication of ideas. This "sign-language," he says in his Preface, "I first accidentally hit upon at Roxburgh Downs, on the Upper Georgina. I was out on horseback one day with some blacks, when one of the 'boys' riding by my side suddenly asked me to halt, as a mate of his in front was after some emus, consisting of a hen-bird and her young progeny. As there had been, apparently to me, no communication whatever between the boy in front and the one close to me, separated as they were by a distance of quite 150 yards, I naturally concluded that my informant was uttering a falsehood, and told him so in pretty plain terms, with the result that, after certain mutual recriminations, he explained on his hands how he had received the information; the statement to be shortly after confirmed by the arrival of the lad himself with the dead bird and some of her young in question."

In his carefully prepared chapter on "Social and Individual Nomenclature," Mr. Roth makes an interesting suggestion in explanation of the class-system of the Pitta-Pitta and other natives whom he describes. The Pitta-Pittas are divided into two exogamous groups, called oótăroo and pâkootă. Every oótăroo again is either a koópooroo or a woóngkō, and every pâkootă either a koórkĭllă or a bŭnbŭri. If the blood-mother be a koópooroo, her child is a woóngkō, and vice versa; if she be a koórkĭllă, her child is a bŭnbŭri, and vice versa. What is the origin of these paedo-matronymic rules? Mr. Roth's suggestion is the following:

"I am strongly of opinion (he writes, p. 69) that, independently of all questions of consanguinity, the paedo-matronyms upon which the marriage-rules depend (and which paedo-matronyms remain constant as compared with the heteronyms) have