From Mr. B. T. Batsford we have received a copy of the privately printed Antique Works of Art from Benin, prepared with all the minute care, accuracy, and completeness that characterise the late General Pitt-Rivers' work. The interest of the volume lies in the plates, for the introduction is a brief historical note on the various expeditions to Benin, and the explanatory letterpress attached to the illustrations is a catalogue, not a criticism. Discovered by the Portuguese, probably in the early fifteenth century, Benin had been visited by the Dutch and by the Swedes before an English expedition arrived on the coast in 1553. It would seem at that time to have been a large town, and trade was encouraged by the king. Both the artistic works, with which this book is concerned, and the human sacrifices, for which the place was afterwards so notorious, were remarked on by a Dutchman—Nyendaeel—in 1702. Benin was visited by Sir Richard Burton and by Captain H. L. Galloway. The latter in 1892 described the city as a mere shadow of its former greatness, having decayed with the abolition of the slave trade. The unfortunate armed expedition into Benin in 1896, from which only two men escaped out of some two hundred and fifty, is within everyone's recollection. The casts, &c., illustrated in this book were found in the royal compound by the punitive expedition of 1897, together with many others, a fine collection of which is in the British Museum. Concerning their origin nothing could be learnt from the natives, although some were obviously used amongst the apparatus of the Ju-ju sacrifices. They were found buried, and covered with blood.
The forty-nine pages of excellent illustrations are well worthy of study, not merely by the folklorist, but by the ethnographer also, as showing, amongst other things, the native appreciation of varying human types. The differences between the realistic negro heads of Nos. 26, 82, 94-99, and 132 are as well marked as those between the Europeans of Nos. 129, 247, 298, and Plate 47. That the type shown in Plate 16 is that of the ruling class is apparent from the close correspondence between this and the conventionalised royal and noble figures on the ritual objects. General Pitt-Rivers
