Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/265

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Reviews.
243

Sex and Society. Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex. By William I. Thomas. Chicago, Illinois: Univ. of Chicago Press, n.d. 8vo, pp. vii + 325.

This book is a collection of papers dealing successively with the organic differences of the sexes; sex in relation to primitive social control; social feeling, primitive industry, and primitive morality; the psychology of exogamy; modesty and clothing; the adventitious character of woman; the mind of woman and the lower races. These essays supply good summaries of a wide literature, but they add little novel information on these well-worn topics. Exogamy he regards as "one expression of the more restless and energetic character of the male. . . . Familiarity with women within the group and unfamiliarity with women without the group is the explanation of exogamy on the side of interest; and the system of exogamy is a result of exchanging familiar women for others."




Aristotle's Researches in Natural Science. By T. E. Lones. West, Newman & Co., 191 2. 8vo, pp. viii-t-274. Ill.

There is a thirteenth-century legend that, when Alexander the Great reached Jerusalem, his teacher Aristotle discovered the hiding-place of the books of Solomon, and learned from them all the wisdom of the Wisest Man. Such was Aristotle's repute before the Revival of Learning and the subsequent unjust contempt for the Greek Sage. Certain of his writings have now been examined afresh by Dr. Lones, who in this volume has carried out a careful and valuable piece of work which, though not primarily addressed to folklorists, will have its uses to them from a twofold aspect. On the one side, it is a summary of Aristotle's writings on natural science, which for many centuries greatly influenced scholars and the Church, and through them popular belief. On the other side, the writings contain much that is evidently not the result of personal investigations, but a record of what was told him by hunters and fishermen, and hence often ancient folklore. For example, Aristotle's belief in