no sacrifice can avert defeat. Then the aim will be to secure the intervention of the United States in order to break the fall for Germany. England must be prepared for a move of the pro-German forces in the United States to this end. In the meantime there should be no advocacy in English journals or on English platforms of any intervention by the United States when the plenipotentiaries who are to settle the terms of peace are being chosen and are about to assemble. There should be no nonsense about 'America's first full open entrance into European politics in the capacity of peacemaker' being 'the assumption of a great historic rôle as glorious for the people of America as it would be beneficial for the peoples of Europe'—a rôle that 'would have the further virtue that it would make a profound appeal to the emotions and imaginations of the people of the United States.' To American sympathisers with the Allies, who after Scarborough and Yarmouth were becoming increasingly impatient with the failure of the Washington Government to protest against the invasion of Belgium, the placing of mines by Germany where they endangered neutral shipping, and the shelling of unfortified towns, such sentiments as those quotedsentiments expressed on the editorial page of a London Liberal weekly journal so recently as December 12excite only ridicule and irritation. Only pro-Germans among Americans ever hint that, in view of the course of events from August to the end of March, the United States can either expect or claim to have any part in the settlement at the end of this appalling war.

EDWARD PORRITT.

The Golden Bough. By J. G. Frazer. First edition, three vols, 1890; third edition, twelve vols. London: Macmillan, 1907-1914.

THE Completion a short while ago of the twelve volumes of The Golden Bough,' with its modest sub-title of 'A Study in Magic and Religion,' is an epoch-making event, we must believe, in the life of the author and certainly in the history of anthropological science. If the dignity of knighthood is the fitting reward for achievement in scientific literature, Sir James Frazer has been rightly selected for that honour. For, besides the work with which this review is concerned and by which mainly this writer will in all probability be remembered and judged, he can reckon to the account of his life's larger output such products as his 'Commentary on Pausanias' and his four volumes on 'Totemism and Exogamy,' and to each of these one might apply Pliny's phrase, 'præclarum opus, etiam si totius vitæ fuisset.' Meantime our author has inaugurated another magnum opus by publishing the first volume of a treatise on 'The Belief in Immortality.'

The colossal work which is now before us for appreciation has grown into its third edition from a much scantier but still ample treatise published in 1890, which had for its aim the solution of the mystery attaching to the priest of Aricia, 'the priest who slew the slayer and shall himself be slain.' But in these twenty-four years the researches of the writer have travelled very far afield from the grove of Nemi. And his excursions have brought back such a booty that it may have become a question of indifference for him and his readers whether he has solved the original riddle that started him on the quest. The titles of these volumes, one on 'The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings,' one on 'Taboo and the Perils of the Soul,' one on 'The Dying God,' and two on the cognate theme of Adonis, Attis, and Osiris, two on 'The Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild,' one on 'The Scapegoat,' two closing volumes on 'Balder the Beautiful : The Fire-Festivals of Europe and the Doctrine of the External Soul,' present the outlines of a world-wide research, and yet are inadequate as a summary of the

varied wealth of material that is in them. For the titles of each book and of some of the chapters fail to indicate the often bewildering variety of the content; in fact, in regard to the two volumes on Balder the Beautiful,' a captious reader and one specially interested in Balder might often be tempted to ery οὐδὲν πρὸς Διόνυσον. But, indeed, the whole series is a vast encyclopædia of primitive and advanced anthropology; and it is hard to mention many problems proper to this field which one does not find discussed or which one could not gather material to elucidate in this labyrinthine treatise. And besides the enormous compilation of primitive facts and the many theories, advanced usually without dogmatism and as if only for the sake of stringing those facts together, there are many oases to allure the reader who girds himself to traverse these thousands of pages; for the writer is skilled in linking up many a savage ritual, many a savage myth and thought, with the achievements of our highest civilisation, our ideal philosophy, science and religion. Hence the sudden digressions on the Greek philosophers, modern science, Kant and Hegel, in which the well-known literary skill of the writer is approved, but which come upon us so unexpectedly that the harsh critic may call them purple patches. Yet the purple is. good and true colour, and has a meaning of its own in the landscape.

To have said as much as this is to say that no critical and adequate review of these volumes will ever be written, for such a review would itself be a volume. The ordinary reviewer may be content to express his reverent admiration for the amazing industry, the devotion to research, the moral energy that could alone inspire and achieve such an intellectual output. But the conscientious critic, having carefully read and pondered on the whole, must try to formulate his impression of the primitive life which the writer reveals, and must candidly give his judgment concerning the value of the methods pursued, the accuracy of the research, and the validity of the inductions drawn.

This picture of the world of thought and belief through which the higher races are assumed to have passed and in which the lower races, even perhaps some of the modern European peasants, are still abiding, may be found by the imaginative reader gloomy, dreadful,

and repulsive. The phrase that seems to have been invented as if for Oxford Greats' papers by an early amateur in these matters, Walter Bagehot-' the mind of the savage is tattooed all over with monstrous images'--will perpetually recur to him. The primitive man of the past and the present is depicted in the pages of Sir James Frazer as a being devoted to cruel, hideous and licentious rites, as ridden with the terrors of demons, ghosts and witches, and tortured with the fears of malignant unseen powers when he rises in the morning and lays him down at night, when he goes out and comes in, when he puts his spade into the soil, when he culls the first-fruits or gathers in the last sheaf of his harvest, when he marries a wife, when his daughter reaches puberty, when he goes on the warpath and no less when he returns triumphant or defeated; and he defends himself against these evils real or imaginary by magic rites that are always futile and wasteful and often very unclean. Our writer is himself well aware of the appalling impression that he gives us of our early ancestors; and, while he usually makes use of his faculty of gentle banter and irony to save himself and his readers from the depressing influence of his facts, yet at times he gives way to his own lurid imagination and intensifies the blackness of his colouring. His chapter on the 'Omnipresence of Demons' (Part vi, p. 73) is a typical example of his power; in his hypothetical reconstruction of the Jewish Passover, starting with the assumption that the primitive Hebrew did actually sacrifice his firstborn, he conjures up the phantom-forms of midnight executioners (Part I, p. 178), and veritably makes our flesh creep-a pastime not wholly scientific. It is in keeping with this that he is inclined to the more pessimistic type of hypotheses, even in respect of ritual where all trace of cruelty has vanished; behind many an innocent masquerade of an All Fools' day, he detects the tragic ritual murder of the aging King; and with the over-eagerness of the earliest pioneers in anthropology, he scents human sacrifice in places where later students would refuse to acknowledge any trace of it, as, for instance, in the quite harmless ritual and ritual-legend of Sosipolis of Elis (vi, p. 353). Moreover, he even ventures on the dismal vaticination that civilisation

and humanity may one day abandon the higher religions and revert to the Walpurgisnacht' of the past (v, 2, p. 335; cf. VI, p. 89). The reader who appreciates our author's facts in their true grimness will tremble at the prospect.

We are not here concerned with his views concerning the future of mankind, but with the picture that he presents of modern savagery which may reflect our own past. The reader who accepts the facts here gathered together as true, and also as the whole truth, may wonder how our race has escaped extinction through the devastating effects of a suicidal race-madness, still more how it has succeeded in winning through into a civilised sanity and a reasonable psychic state. Certainly we may draw one induction from this survey of the anthropological phenomena, namely, that the human animal, just because he combines a rudimentary thought with intensity of emotion and feeling, is liable to morbid and often self-destructive exaggeration of sentiment and to perilous disturbances of the mental equilibrium; hence the ghastly self-mutilations of savages, their exhausting asceticisms, their occasional deaths from the terrors of taboo and the spirit-world or from the auto-suggestion of sorcerers. His magic is, indeed, to some extent protective; and, as Sir James Frazer has observed, the higher religion of the good deity may sometimes deliver from the menace of evil spirits. But magic may kill as many as it saves; and high religion has at times diffused as dark and deadly a terror as the lower polydaimonism. It is fortunate that primitive as well as civilised man has been helped by other influences, by the faculty of contradicting himself, by the refusal to carry through a fatal logic of life or death, by the power of insouciance whereby he can escape from his morbid states into a saving and restful lightheartedness.

Sir James' picture is the more lurid because he does not sufficiently emphasise the other side. At times he shows himself aware of it, as when, in dealing with the omnipresence of demons, he says (Part VI, p. 78), 'The savage and indeed the civilised man is incapable, at least in his normal state, of such excessive preoccupation with a single idea, which, if prolonged, could hardly fail to end in insanity'; and in a note there he quotes some