THE publication of Prof. Frazer's Gifford lectures has been awaited with interest by students of anthropology and religion. Their subject was one of the first to occupy the author's attention; his paper on primitive burial customs placed the study of the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead in a new light. He has now given us the first instalment of a comprehensive survey of the whole institution. Psychical and ceremonial though it is, the doctrine and cult form an institution as deserving of the name as political government. The belief in some degree of immortality has been practically universal, and is still a “last infirmity of noble mind”; some form of “worship,”fear of the ghost or actual veneration of the deified ancestor, has accompanied the belief in the case of the majority of peoples. The author acutely points out, for the consideration of “historians and economists, as well as of moralists and theologians,”that the direct consequences of this moral institution have been grave and far-reaching, such as no mere sentiment could have produced, not only in primitive but in civilised history. It has, he says, “not merely coloured the outlook of the individual upon the world; it has deeply affected the social and political relations of humanity in all ages; for the religious wars and persecutions, which distracted and devastated Europe for ages, were only the civilised equivalents of the battles and murders which the fear of ghosts has instigated amongst almost all races of savages of whom we possess a record. … And when we consider further the gratuitous and wasteful destruction of property, as well as of life, which is involved in sacrifices to the dead, we must admit that with all its advantages the belief in immortality has entailed heavy economical losses upon the races—and they are practically all the races of the world—who have indulged in this expensive luxury.”

The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead.

By Prof. J. G. Frazer. Vol. i.: The Belief among the Aborigines of Australia, the Torres Straits Islands, New Guinea, and Melanesia. Pp. xxi + 495. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1913.) Price 10s. net.