NATURE 



?6i 



THURSDAY, JANUARY 28, 1909. 



RELIGIOUS AND SEXUAL PSYCHOLOGY. 

 (i) Volkcrpsychologie, eine Untcrsiichung der Ent- 



i^HckdtiHgsgesctze von Sprache, Mythiis und Sitte. 



By Wilhelm Wundt. Zweiter Band, Mythus und 



Religion, zweiter Teil. Pp. viii+481. (Leipzig: 



\V. Engelmann, 1906.) Price 11 marks. 

 (2) Das Geschlechtsleben in der V biker psychologie. 



By Otto Stoll. Pp. xiv+1020. (Leipzig: Veit and 



Co., igo8.) Price 30 marks. 

 I ) nPHLS volume contjyns a single chapter of Wundt's 

 J- great work, and deals ostensibly with ideas 

 as to the soul; in reality, however, its scope is much 

 wider, and only one of the four parts actually deals 

 with animism. The second part deals with animism 

 at the outset, but passes on to discuss magic and 

 fetichism ; the third discusses totemism, tabu, 

 sacrifice, and the cult of ancestors; and the 

 fourth, again, approaches the subject-heading of 

 the chapter in dealing with demons, vegetation 

 " spirits," and tutelary deities. 



Under certain conditions a work of this description 

 would be invaluable, but the conditions are not ful- 

 filled in the present case. In the first place, there 

 must be an adequate monographic treatment of the 

 sphere w-ith which such a monumental work as the 

 present deals, and monographs are far too infrequent 

 in the field of comparative religion ; to make matters 

 worse, the author has not even consulted such as 

 exist — he writes on sacrifice and magic without men- 

 tioning the indispensable studies on these subjects by 

 Hubert and Mauss. In the second place, the author, 

 if he is not an ethnologist by profession, must have 

 clear-cut ideas on the subjects of which he treats, and 

 define as rigidly as possible the terms which he 

 employs. But in the present volume we find pages 

 of discussion on magic, fetichism, totemism, and tabu, 

 but nowhere an adequate definition of any of these 

 terms, though they are far from unambiguous. 



The lack of definition makes itself particularly felt 

 in the pages on totemism j the author includes under 

 totems not only totems proper, kin or individual, but 

 also all the animals enumerated by Frazer in the 

 " Golden Bough " under the heading of animal cults. 

 He commits himself to the assertion that totems are 

 criginally soul-animals (Seelentiere), that is, animals 

 inhabited by the souls of ancestors. One of the cen- 

 tral features of South African totemism, if totemism 

 it be, is the belief that the souls of dead chiefs pass 

 into or become the totem animals of their kin ; but 

 so far from this being a universal belief, the totem 

 in the greater part of Australia is neither an ancestor 

 nor has any connection with ancestors, and 

 where, as in the Central tribes, totems appear 

 as akin to ancestors, they are not " Seelen- 

 tiere," and the totemism is not primitive, accord- 

 ing to the view most commonly held ; in fact, some 

 recent researches by P. W. Schmidt go to show that 

 north Australian totemism is really derived from New 

 Guinea. 



To say that the work is not one which the student 

 NO. 2048, VOL. 79] 



of comparative religion can read with profit would be 

 to do great injustice to the book with which we are 

 dealing; often the specialist in one branch owes in- 

 valuable suggestions to the unbiassed attitude of the 

 specialist of another sphere ; but the work is one to 

 be read critically. We may be doing injustice to the 

 distinguished author, but the comparative scarcity of 

 examples and references to authorities suggests that 

 the solution of many problems has been attacked 

 with a quite insufficient preparation. In many places 

 a characteristic Teutonic tendency to abstract argu- 

 ment manifests itself, and throughout the work we 

 feel that the author stands rather far from primitive 

 man, with whom he is largely concerned; if he were 

 intimately acquainted with one uncivilised race his 

 discussion of many points would gain immeasurably. 

 The first part of this work — on language — has gained 

 immensely by the author's careful revision, and we 

 may hope that he will be able to give us in a second 

 edition of the present part as many improvements as 

 in the second edition of the earlier part. 



(2) In this series of twenty-six lectures Dr. Stoll 

 deals with many problems which at first sight seem to 

 have little relation to the subject of the book, and in 

 point of fact only one-third of them deal with strictly 

 sexual questions. The author begins by a general 

 account of sexual life in the animal w-orld, and illus- 

 trates the rdle played by the various senses, sexual 

 dimorphism and other points ; he then proceeds to take 

 the senses in man one by one, and discusses the 

 factors of sexual life under these five heads. The 

 category of sight, for example, covers such various 

 subjects as the fattening of women in Africa, skull and 

 other deformations, tatu and body scarring, treatment 

 of the ear, nose, hair, beard, teeth, &c., body-painting 

 and ornaments, amulets, &'C., and in the chapters 

 dealing with these subjects we find such unexpected 

 themes as scalping, pariah castes, and' mourning 

 colours. 



In the nineteenth chapter we approach more specific- 

 ally sexual questions, such as circumcision, in connec- 

 tion with which Dr. Stoll discusses the subincision of 

 the Central Australian area ; it may be noted that he 

 is mistaken in his account of the distribution of the 

 operation, which he gives as " the interior of Queens- 

 land, New South Wales and South Australia, with a 

 large part of the north and west." In point of fact, 

 in Queensland it is found only in the west, and in 

 the extreme north-west corner of New South Wales; 

 more than one map of the distribution of the practice 

 has been published. 



In his discussion of the origin of circumcision Dr. 

 Stoll rejects, as may be imagined, the common 

 theories that cleanliness or other practical motives 

 pla\-ed any part ; but apart from generalities about the 

 cruelty of primitive man, the mystical nature of blood 

 customs, &c., he has no suggestion to make. It is a 

 well-known fact that peoples in the lower stages of 

 culture sometimes emphasise instead of concealing the 

 genital organs; and it is possible that in some cases 

 this was a motive for circumcision ; but in view of the 

 fact that we find the knocking out of teeth taking the 

 place of operations on the genital organs in, for 

 example, the east of .Australia, it seems reasonable to 



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