Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/533

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Reviews.
509

(such as R. J. T. Browne for E. G. Browne, and Sir John Manderville). The student of religion will be glad to have an unbiassed account of the ideals of these orders. There is not much in the book that belongs to folklore, but we must except the few pages on the state of ecstasy in which the Rūfai dervishes wound themselves with hot irons or lick them without any sign of pain; the wounds are said to leave no trace after twenty-four hours, but we should have liked Miss Garnett to tell us if she has ever examined such wounds herself. Dervishes are also said to be able to transport themselves to a distance at will (p. 160). Nearly every page is adorned with a story or anecdote, many of them very interesting.




Among Congo Cannibals. Experiences, impressions and adventures during a thirty years' sojourn amongst the Boloki and other Congo tribes, with a description of their curious habits, customs, religion and laws. By John H. Weeks. Seeley, Service & Co., 1912. 8vo, pp. 352. Map + 111.

The author of this work is well known to members of the Folk-Lore Society, and indeed to everyone who has during the last fifteen or twenty years taken an interest in the affairs of the Congo. He was the first British missionary to call attention to the crimes of Leopold II. and his underlings, and had no inconsiderable share in rescuing the Congo natives from oppression comparable to those of Putumayo and Russia. His missionary life has extended for upwards of thirty years, nine of which were spent on the Lower Congo at San Salvador and Matadi, and the rest, after exploring the river and some of its tributaries for many miles, at Monsembe on the Upper Congo. The people among whom he found himself there were part of a congeries of tribes collectively known as Bangala. But this name has been recently applied to the inhabitants of so large an area that Mr. Weeks has now preferred to use the more specific term of Boloki to denote "the inhabitants of certain towns on the main river, on the