Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/543

 Reviews. 233

with William the Conqueror, 1066. What would Mrs. Markham or William's Preceptor have thought of Miss Fleming's original method — a method which she has herself practised with signal success — of teaching both history and geography by means of folk tales ? One has but to glance at this collection to under- stand the possibilities. Even the most superficial reader, one who reads for the sake of the stories alone, cannot fail to be struck by the vivid pictures they contain, pictures of human experience at all times and in all cUmes. And human experience, as Miss Fleming notes in the valuable appendix at the end of the book, lies at the base of all history and all geography, and proves the common Hnk that binds them together. Here is human experience represented in its simplest and earliest forms, and that is why these stories have a special appeal to those of us whose human experiences are yet in the making. Fortunate, indeed, are those little ones who are led on to the attack out- lined in Appendix III. They may study the clash of different civilisations : — ^Stone Age and Metal Age ; Hunter and Farmer ; Lake Dweller and Nomad ; Hills and Plains ; Settled Egyptian culture and Wanderers from the desert or the sea ; Babylonian trader and Assyrian warrior ; Aryan and Dravidian ; Hellene and Barbarian ; Greek and Persian ; Roman South and Barbaric North ; Moor and Spaniard ; Spaniard and Aztec.

Or the study may be of tabus which bring out geographic and social conditions clearly. " Cursed he he thai removeth his neigh- bour's land mark has little meaning in. a well-ordered English village where the fields are clearly marked off one from another, but it was full of meaning in the muddy reaches of the Nile and Mesopotamia." These are only a few among the schemes for making the tales a storehouse of geographical or historical information. But it is not only the geographer and historian who will rifle the storehouse. The anthropologist will find abundance of valuable material. Should he, too, wish to use the tales educationally he will find it an entertaining exercise to listen to them being read aloud, all proper names omitted, and guess the region from which each is derived. ' Perhaps the most valuable result of the wide outlook of modern geographers, to which this book bears witness, is the engendering of a better