Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/538

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Reviews.

the father, the mother has no particular interest in them" (p. 129). It is an interesting suggestion, and one that would be worth keeping in mind for the investigation of cases elsewhere. Another acute observation is that "the word for sorrow is ukele, which really means anger, indignation; and the idea is that they are angry that their relative has been done to death by the witch." No word but this was found for grief or sorrow at the death of any one,—"a very suggestive side-light on the native view of death."

But enough has been said to show that the book is a valuable account of native life by one who has sojourned among the Congo people for many years, and learned to know them and their ways and modes of thought. Most of the photographs and sketches which adorn it are excellent, though the map might have been improved.




The Egyptian Elements in the Legend of the Body and the Soul. By Louise Dudley. (Bryn Mawr College Monographs, Vol. VIIL). Pennsylvania: Bryn Mawr College, 191 1. 8vo, pp. xi+ 179.

In the present volume of the Bryn Mawr College Monographs, Miss Dudley has made a very useful collection of the material bearing upon this question of the Egyptian Elements in the Legend of the Body and the Soul. As her sources are naturally the old theological and religious treatises, the monograph will be mainly useful for comparison with the popular beliefs. I refer, as examples, to two of these. The first, in connection with the soul's unwillingness to separate from the body (chap, ii.), of which the Palestine story of the death of Moses affords an interesting illustration. (Cf. my article Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina Vereins, vol. xxxii., "Das Nebi Musa Fest"). The other is as to the angels by whom souls are removed (chap, iii.), where again I would instance a Palestinian belief that the angel of death assumes a hideous aspect when he comes to take possession of an evil soul. His teeth are said to reach down to his feet.