Dr. Karl Weule, Professor and Director of the Ethnographical Museum at Leipzig, has recorded first in a "popular" manner, and secondly in an official report (reviewed in vol. xx., pp. 244-5), the results of an ethnological expedition undertaken on behalf of the Museum to the German possessions in East Africa. The book described above is the translation by Miss Alice Werner of the former. The author has been extremely fortunate in his translator, whose qualifications for the task are unsurpassed. It may easily be believed indeed that the translation is an improvement upon the original edition. For Miss Werner's experience of the East African native and her rare knowledge of the Bantu languages and of Bantu ethnology enable her to check and confirm or modify many of the statements of the author; so that the best criticism on the book is probably to be found in her introduction and notes.
Anthropological science owes a great debt to Germany. The authorities of the various German museums grasped years ago the importance of setting about at once to collect and compare the outward appliances of savage and barbarous life. They fitted out expedition after expedition for the purpose, and reaped so rich a harvest of ethnographical material in various parts of the world that now, in order to study the economics and art of the natives even of British colonies, it is frequently necessary to resort, not to London or Oxford, but to Berlin or Leipzig. In pursuit of this object they have doubtless to some extent neglected what to those of us who have been trained in the school of Tylor is even more important, the study of the mental and spiritual sides of the lower culture. Partly due to this cause, partly to his inexperience as a collector of folklore, and partly to his very brief stay in the country,—(he was there little more than six months),—must be reckoned the inferiority of Dr. Weule's results in this direction; though even here he has done something.
