Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/723

Rh has always been a myth-making people. To many of us the most familiar indication of the place occupied by gods, saints and fairies in popular fancy is the frequency with which they are represented in all forms of Far Eastern artistic production dating back to the beginning of our era.

The author ends with an estimate of religious feeling in modern China, and it strikes one as an extraordinarily just and unbiased outline of the situation. For the sake of this alone the book should be read by all who wish to understand a race destined to figure more and more prominently on the world's stage.

Presidential Address by Sir Baldwin Spencer has been reprinted from the Official Report. It is worth the study of every anthropologist. After a sketch of the history of the Association, and in particular of the history of the researches on the native race of Australia, in which incidentally he pleads powerfully for the employment of trained women to investigate the native women and their customs, apart from the men, he goes on to deal with the organization of the Australian tribes, illustrating by diagrams and tables the distribution of the tribes according to their descent, whether matrilineal or patrilineal, and that of their moieties and class-names. The facts are of course known to all students of the important works of Sir Baldwin Spencer and the late Mr. F. J. Gillen, but they are necessary to be fresh in the mind for the succeedngsucceeding [sic] discussion.

Sir Baldwin insists on the distinction between savage kinship and consanguinity, and on the absence of anything more than the earliest rudiment among the Blackfellows of a recognition of the terms of consanguinity as known to us. Kinship as recognized among them was that of the "classificatory system,"