200
NOTES AND QUERIES. [ii s. xi. MAR. 6 , 1915.
Turning to the animal world, the author says :
- ' Perhaps hardly enough importance has hitherto
"been attached by students to the idea of the super- human power and knowledge of animals. Yet it is widely spread." " Many of the North American tribes think of animals as bound together in tribes and communities like human "beings, and acting like human beings, but wielding superhuman power."
Under the title of ' Kites of Individual Life' there is much that is curious. A Welshwoman during pregnancy, even at the present day, is for- bidden to make up butter or do any work in the dairy, to salt bacon, or to touch any part of a slaughtered pig, " for the touch of such a woman is regarded as very pernicious." In the Northern Counties there is still a belief that a woman has no remedy at law for any insults or blows she may receive if seen out of doors " unchurched."
Under ' Calendar Fasts and Festivals ' we find traces of the old agricultural reckoning by seasons : " In the Isle of Man it is a debatable question whether the 1st of January or the 1st of November is the true New Year's Day, for the latter is the date for entering all farm-holdings or farm service."
Miss Burne has evidently thoroughly enjoyec the task of rewriting the little pioneer work o: 1890, and she expresses " a final hope that the compressed form in which it has been necessary to present the various examples cited will not mislead any reader into supposing that such summaries are all that is needful to give of any scenes of the kind which he or she may be so fortunate as to witness, and that minute particu- lars would only be tedious. On the contrary, the fuller the details supplied, the more welcome will the record be to the scientific world."
This Handbook should lead to an increase in the number of students in the worldwide field of folk-lore. The present volume shows what results have been attained since our founder coined the word in 1846, and also indicates, as Miss Burne says, how much there is yet to accomplish.
The Fortnightly Review and The Nineteenth Century both set before their readers this month studies critical, inconclusive, and somewhat gloomy, as they are bound to be of the conditions and problems which surround the main business of the war, whether in present, past, or future. The sum total of them is to press home more vigor- ously than any of these collections of essays have yet done since the beginning of hostilities a sense of the vastness and heaviness of the task which awaits the European Governments in general, and
our own in particular, when the task of the moment
is accomplished. The Fortnightly has three or four
papers more or less disconnected from the great
topic, and we may include among them a charm-
ingly written sketch of a French chateau, and a
French family as visited just before the war, from
T e w P n T? of ** lMl '?V Manatafiftan Caffyn. Mr.
1 . H. S. Escott in Lord Beaconsfield in Society '
preserves one or two pleasant anecdotes, though
perhaps no sentence is more likely to provoke a
smile, than one of the writer's own, in which he
explains that, even after promotion to the
peerage, Disraeli did not intentionally drop the
untitled hosts whose modest hospitalities. . . "
iv i . , Ne ? lect and Misuse of Bach's Organ
\\orks, by Mr. Heathcote Statham, is a welcome
article, for which we can but desire the attention
of lovers of music. Mr. W. W. Gibson has a
striking poem, ' The Blast Furnace,' in which,
however, the employment of the traditional form
of " blank verse " struck us rather as the top-hats
m the pictures of early cricketers do. No doubt,
m the deep nature of things, there is no reason
why men should not play cricket in top-hats.
Mr. John Palmer s ' Bernard Shaw : an Epitaph '
is a clever, and in the main well-aimed piece of
criticism, which, despite a scathing line or two at
the beginning, by no means errs through lack of
appreciation.
In The Nineteenth Century, under the title ' Self- Appomted Statesmen,' Mr. J. O. P. Bland has a vigorous article in which Mr. H. G. Wells and Mi- Bernard Shaw are bracketed together for rebuke, while a scattering of reprimands is thrown out against minor imaginative writers. Some of the remarks are, perhaps, harsher than need be ; but probably the main contention of the paper will command fairly general assent. Mr. John Free- man writes on 'Poetry Prophecy, and the War' a discussion, that is, of the works of Mr. Doughty ajid Mr. Thomas Hardy. Dr. Thomson continues the pleasant dispute, transferred to these pages from The Quarterly Revieto, as to the right of logic to survive. Beyond these all the papers are directly concerned either with the war or with social questions arising out of it, unless we except the description of a trip to Siberia last July and August by Miss Dora Curtis. Mr. Brend has some grave warnings to impart on the subject of the birth-rate, but we hardly think he was justified 111 choosing for his contribution a title so crude and comically alarming as ' The Passing of the Child.
ta
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SLEUTH-HOUND. " Si vis pacem," &c., was dis- cussed at 11 S. vii. 308, 394. At the latter reference PROF. BENSLY quotes the passage from Dion Chrysostom. He suggests since the origin of the phrase as commonly quoted is not known that it would be useful to record the earliest instances of it. It is not thought to be ancient.
