Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/392

384 A new Handbook of Comparative Mythology.—All who have followed with any degree of attention the recent progress of comparative mythology must have been struck by the fundamental differences between the most prominent scholars not only as to the results hitherto achieved, but as to the method and scope of the science. It is hardly too much to say that the study of comparative mythology consists of a number of more or less discredited and mutually destructive hypotheses. Herr Otto Gruppe has been so struck by this that he has endeavoured, in a work entitled "Die griechischen Culte und Mythen in ihren Beziehungen zu den orientalischen Religionen," to supply a firm basis for future research. He well points out that the present confusion is even more detrimental to the scholar, to whom the investigation of mythological phenomena is of subsidiary importance, than to the professed mythologist. His method is that of systematic comparison of the entirety of the religious systems of the races, whether Aryan or Semitic, of antiquity. Myths must be treated in his opinion as living organisms, not as crystallised forms, and a Handbook of Comparative Mythology must in a large measure be equally a comparative history of religious systems. As a preliminary step he discusses the main existing hypotheses, and it will interest many members of the Society to know that he considers the methods and results of what he calls the Kuhn-Max Müller school to be fallacious. The first volume of this important work may be looked for shortly. Mr. D. Nutt will be the London agent.

It is reported that Lieutenant Bassett is engaged on a work entitled Legends and Superstitions of the Sea. Two Members of the Society, namely, the Rev. W. Gregor and the Rev. W. S. Lach-Szyrma, have for some months been collecting the Folk-lore of the Sea, and we ought before long to possess all that is worth preserving of this branch of folk-lore.

Dr. E. B. Nicholson is editing Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, from the first edition, and it will be published by Mr. Stock almost immediately.