Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 7.djvu/87

 9*8. VII. JAN. 26, 1901.) NOTES AND QUERIES.

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be given for preservation and guardianship. In the full sense of the word it is a national undertaking. Government such Governments as we get will do nothing to encourage work of the class or workers such as those to whom it is owing. A great univer- sity is prepared to bear much of the cost, but in so doing finds its educational resources crippled. Everything that private co-operation can do to lighten cost should be done, to prove to those to whom the book is due that their labours, if unrecognized by the State, are at least held in highest account by scholarship. We have received the fourth volume in its half -morocco binding, and shall seek an opportunity of saying something further about it.

The Golden Bough : a Study in Magic and Religion. By J. G. Frazer, D.C.L. Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged. 3 vols. (Macmillan & Co.) No satire upon the modern craze for instancing the best dozen, score, or hundred books can better show the futility of such things than the fact that from all the lists we have looked over with amuse- ment, not wholly untinged with contempt, the name of Dr. Frazer's ' Golden Bough ' has been absent. Some books of enduring value, such as Darwin's ' Origin of Species,' have necessarily been included in lists made up generally of works of purely temporary and ephemeral reputation, with which the next generation will no more concern itself than the average man concerns himself with " the snows of yester-year.'"' Yet a book of genuine importance such as this has always been overlooked. Neither final nor conclusive in its argument is, as its author will admit, ' The Golden Bough.' It is none the less epoch-marking, and is the most im- portant contribution yet made to a knowledge of primitive creed and culture and to what may perhaps be called a hydrographical survey of the world of mystery and darkness in the midst of which man's life is cast. Recognition of its merits was at first confined to a limited circle. When in 1890 the first edition saw the light, it attracted little attention outside those already interested deeply in the class of speculations with which it dealt. Some of those who purchased it on the strength of its title or the commendation they heard fall from competent lips were in a position similar to the men who under a like kind of delusion bought ' The Diversions of Purley. ; Slowly, however, a sense of its transcendent interest and merits spread abroad, and a second edition, augmented to double the bulk of the original, appears within eleven years, in answer to a persistent and earnest demand on the part of scholars.

The book is not wholly original. Dr. Frazer haila as his master Robertson Smith, the well- known author of ' The Religion of the Semites,' and he owns that without the works of the late W. Mannhardt on the living superstitions of the peasant his work could scarcely have been attempted. His way had, moreover, been prepared for him by scores of keen-eyed travellers, who had observed and collected such superstitious practices as form the base of all primitive religion, and gatherers and sorters of folk-lore practices, the full significance of which those who first collected them were far from com- prehending. In a portion of his task he had been to some extent anticipated by Dr. Tylor, whose
 * Primitive Culture,' the second edition of which

appeared in 1873, remains an authority. Without going further into the question of indebtedness, we may dismiss the long list of Dr. Frazer's prede- cessors. Great as are the additions he has made in the second edition now published, they are not exhaustive of his own collections even, since he expresses a wish, which will be generally reciprocated, that he may before long meet the reader again in the fields he has traversed.

Especially important are the additions that have been made, since the appearance of Dr. Frazer's first edition, to our knowledge of the habits and practices of the inhabitants of Central Australia. Prominent among them is 'The Native Tribes of Central Australia' of Spencer and Gillen, to which we drew attention (see 9 th S. iii. 338). Dr. Fra/er has also been privileged with access to a work, unpublished as yet, on Australian folk-lore, by Miss Mary E. B. Howitt. Mr. W. W. Skeai's recently published work on the Malay Peninsula, with which personally we are unfamiliar, is also a source of supplementary information. Important and numerous as are the additions from these and other sources, they add little or nothing to the main thread of Dr. Frazer's argument or assump- tion. The central idea was thoroughly and con- vincingly worked out in the first edition, and the explanation of the significance of the Rex nemorum and of the mystery of the Arician trees,

in whose dim shadow The ghastly priest doth reign, The priest who slew the slayer,

And shall himself be slain,

remains what it was a masterly and imaginative piece of reasoning and analysis. We use the word imaginative advisedly, since, as says K. O. Miiller, imagination must always in historical inquiries " supply the bonds that link together the broken fragments of tradition." What is the nature of the most important departure that has been made is shown in the change in the second half of the title. In the original this stands, ' A Study in Comparative Religion.' It now runs, ' A Study in Magic and Religion.' The conclusion now stated is that " the movement of the higher thought, so far as we can trace it, has been from magic through religion to science." Nothing is dogmatically advanced, and Dr. Frazer is not only aware thac much that he states is not to be regarded as defi- nitely or finally established, but is disinclined to tie himself down to any absolute assertion. As regards science even, he holds that "at bottom the generalizations of science, or, in common par- lance, the laws of nature, are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasma- goria of thought which we dignify with the high- sounding names of the world and the universe. In the last analysis magic, religion, and science are nothing but theories of thought ; and as science has supplanted its predecessors, so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some totally different way of looking at the phenomena of registering the shadows on the screen of which we in this generation can form no idea."

What are the general purpose and contention of Dr. Frazer'* work we must suppose our readers to know. If they are personally interested in folk- lore, they cannot well be ignorant. If they are otherwise, they have no excuse for remaining so. Space, at least, utterly fails us to supply the know-