538 Short Notices.
Short Notices.
Legends of the City of Mexico. Collected by Thomas A. Janvier. Harper & Bros., 1910. Post 8vo, pp. xix+ 165, 111.
In this volume Mr. Janvier has collected and annotated nine- teen stories of a kind of which far too few have yet been printed, — town stories in which the results can be examined of the popular mind working upon historical and alien traditions and moulding them to its liking. The tales were gathered in Monterey and Mexico City mainly from the old women who are everywhere the chief depositories of traditionary wisdom, and the book is one to be added to every folk-tale library. It would have been well to state in the preface that the text of twelve stories (without the notes) has previously appeared, — viz. in Harper's Magazine for 1906.
The Niger and the West Sudan, or The West African^s Note Book. By Capt. A. J. N. Tremearne. Hodder & Stoughton, 1910. 8vo, pp. vii+ 151.
The usefulness of this book is not limited to the many who go nowadays as travellers or officials to West Africa, as, besides numerous notes about kits, passages, etc., it contains convenient summaries of past history and 49 pages concerning the races of British West Africa, (including a reprint of the account of the Hausas referred to on p. 199 ante). Capt. Tremearne, (as shown also by his Hausa tales in Folk-Lore), is one of the new school of administrators, whose efficiency is enormously increased by a sympathetic and scientific interest in the natives under their charge. As he himself observes (p. 78), "the more an official studies the natives the more he must sympathise with and be interested in them, and the greater must be his knowledge of their laws and ideas of justice."
Books for Review should be addressed to
The Editor of Folk-Lore,
c/o David Nutt,
57-59 Long Acre, London, W.C.
