of these is embodied in Ernst Samter's Geburt, Hochzeit und Tod (Leipsic and Berlin, 1911), in which work the author, drawing his deductions almost entirely from the practices of European peoples, arrives at conclusions, as to the origins of a number of those practices, which in large part coincide with those I had independently arrived at mainly through the study of Far Eastern material. This general coincidence in many results is peculiarly striking in view of the various other theories which have been put forward to explain European broom superstitions, connecting them, for example, with the worship of agricultural divinities or with the practising of human fertility rites. The second collection, which forms a considerable portion of Friedrich Kunze's "Der Birkenbesen ein Symbol des Donar,"[1] is based largely on an attempt to marshal material indicating that the broom has derived its virtues as a magical implement among European peoples from the birch-tree whose twigs are often used to form it. That this attempt has been ill-founded appears to me to be indicated not only by the existence in many parts of the world of beliefs identical or almost identical with those he cites, but associated with brooms made of many kinds of plants, but also by the fact that—as he himself sometimes recognizes—his conclusions, drawn along lines to support the thesis he sets out to maintain, do not always explain even the examples he brings forward. In my attempt to elucidate the Japanese applications of brooms in what we consider superstitious practices I purpose in general to confine myself to the use of explanatory material drawn from either Japan or China. I shall, however, briefly call attention, for the most part in footnotes, to certain parallels—some of them of peculiar interest because, in spite of their respective bases seeming to lie in complex conceptions,
- ↑ In Internat. Archiv für Ethnographie, vol. xiii. (Leyden, 1900), pp. 81-97 and 125-162 inc.
