Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/725

Rh tribes. He is of opinion that all the divergences of organization and custom may be better accounted for by supposing that, as in the case of the various developments of the fauna, the race entered Australia little differentiated but with a capacity for variation, and the result has been, in Bateson's words, "an unfolding or unpacking of an original complex which contained within itself the whole range of diversity which living things present." The arguments are too long, and many of them too technical, to present in this short notice; but they ought to be studied in extenso as the arguments which present themselves to a scientific man of high biological repute and long experience among the natives with whom he is dealing. They are the most important contribution which he has published to our knowledge of the questions involved since he first introduced the Arunta to us.

I may be pardoned for adding that, though he formerly entertained a different view, he is now "inclined to think that in Australia descent was originally counted in the female line," thus adding the great weight of his matured opinion to that long advocated by most British anthropologists.

has given us a delightful, interesting and suggestive book. She left the usual highway of literature and wandered unaccompanied through a forlorn and almost forgotten garden, and there she gathered flowers one by one with the love of the poet and the judgment of the scholar, and she has made a garland which will retain for many years to come its freshness, beauty and sweet scent. As she herself points out, the Herbals belong to a branch of forgotten literature; in the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica no room was found for a special rubric. They deserved a better fate, although had some small reference appeared in the Encyclopaedia we might perhaps not