ness, the devil. He touches upon that curious but perfectly understandable belief, the metamorphosis into animals, and from this to totemism is but a step in the line of thought. Mr. Clodd's chapter on totemism is one of the most interesting in the book. We wish his chapter on Myth among the Hebrews had been more elaborate. He just stays to point out its general bearing, but does not dip into it; and yet, if we mistake not, the subject is considerably in advance of the stage which Mr. Clodd thinks it has reached.
In all his researches Mr. Clodd, as a true scientist, deals lovingly with the past. More than once he sets forth how valuable to us are the "old wives' fables," the "wise saws," the curious superstition or custom; and in his chapter on conclusions from the study of dreams he sets forth canons of human belief which embraces all the past lovingly, because in that can man only find his place in the oneness of nature. Because we relegate old theologies to the category of myths, old faiths and beliefs to that of superstitions, we should not sneer at or disdain myth and superstition. They are the records of human progress, and man stands alone in nature in being able to look back upon a past, not now measured by family or national history, but by the history of ages which are not yet measurable.
Novelle popolari Toscane, illustrate da Dr. Giuseppe Pitrè. Firenze, G. Barbèra, 1885.
Dr. Pitrè, who has deserved so well of the Folkloristi of all countries, has just sent us a volume of his labours in a new field. By dint of much loving perseverance brought to bear on the island of Sicily in the very nick of time, while so much of its, so to speak, various antiquities—Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Noraian as well as what may be technically called Sicilian—still remained stereotyped sur place; and before all things had become new under the all-pervading influence of progress and schoolboards, he has put on record, in the imperishable storehouses of our libraries, a mass of world-old memories which but for him must have been lost to us for ever.
With almost heroic devotion to his work he has for a quarter of a century occupied himself with thus saving from destruction the folk-lore of Sicily; but the conscientious study with which Dr. Pitrè
