This fifth series of M. van Gennep's Essays is dedicated to M. Henri Junod; but it deals hardly at all with specially African matters. It is divided into two parts. The first begins with a consideration of the lacunæ in the ethnography of the present day, and is a timely protest against the insufficiency of its recognition in university curricula and as a subject of practical value on the one hand, and the want of proper manuals for its teaching on the other. The author points to Buschan's Völker Kunde as the nearest approximation hitherto published to the type of manual which is desirable. Miss Burne's new edition of the Handbook of Folklore has been issued since. M. van Gennep insists that ethnography is not an historical science, nor ought it to be primarily occupied with the collection and study of material fabrics. This is too much the case, especially in Germany, where it has given rise to the theories and the works of Foy and Graebner, who- altogether mistake the objects and method of study.
The author then proceeds to the consideration of The Golden Bough and of some recent publications on Totemism. He launches some acute criticisms both on The Golden Bough and on Sir James Frazer's Totemism and Exogamy; but he does not spare the other students who have taken part in discussions during the last three or four years on the problem of Totemism. He does not himself pretend to have a solution of the problem, and his critical observations are fair and by no means unfriendly.
The essay following is an account of Mr. Walter Leaf's Troy, a Study in Homeric Geography, for which he expresses considerable admiration.
The second part of the volume is a very interesting study of the beginnings of ethnographic science, which M. van Gennep claims to have taken its rise in France in the eighteenth century. The great names in the history of this movement are naturally Lafitau and De Brosses. The Jesuit Lafitau was a man of culture before he became a missionary. Brought into contact with the Hurons and Iroquois of North America, he was struck by the resemblance of their ideas and civilization to those of the Ancient Greeks and
