Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/98

74 morality. The official religion of Babylonia endeavoured to harmonise the two conceptions by laying down that the deep had been handed over to Ea after the conquest of Tiâmat and the victory of law; it was the deep as confined within limits which were never to be overpassed which was the habitation of the god of wisdom, not the deep of primæval time. It is clear, however, that at the outset the two conceptions were exclusive of one another: that the one regarded the sea as the agent of culture, while according to the other it was the evil element in nature, tolerable only when kept within bounds, and inconsistent with that newer world of light and order in which, as we are told in the Apocalypse, there shall be "no more sea." In my Hibbert Lectures I have suggested that the difference between the two conceptions is of local origin; that the idea of the sea as the domain of Ea arose at Eridu, the seaport of early Chaldæa, whereas the idea of it as the embodiment of Tiâmat goes back to the days when the first settlers in Babylonia were carrying on a precarious struggle with the waves for the possession of the land.

This, however, has little to do with the main object of the little volume I have been reviewing. It is, it seems, the first of a series of "Studies on Biblical Subjects;" and if the other volumes of the series are written with as much skill and knowledge, they are certain to receive an appreciative welcome. A. H. S.

This book collects the evidence, ancient and modern, for the existence of Germanic tribes on the coast of the Black Sea. The author first discusses the scanty information available on the Germans in Asia Minor, Gothograeci, Dagottheni, and others, and then passes to the Eudusiani, the Tetraxitos, and the Germanic tribes about the Caucasus, whom he derives from these latter. Evidence is adduced to show the continued existence of the last-named through the Middle Ages and on to the fifteenth century in the Crimean district; in which century they seem to have been