Welsh Journals

164 BYE-GONES. Aug 4. 1897. Zoologist, says the redshank is a resident at Barmouth. Dr W. H. Dobie, in "Birds of West Cheshire, Denbighshire and Flintshire " published in " Proceedings of the Chester Society of Natural Science, 1894"), says that a few pairs breed near the Dee in Wirral, but that he has no record of it breeding inland. To go further back, Mr A. G. More, in 1865, published in the " Ibis," a list of birds and their distribution during the nesting season, but he failed to find any authority for the nesting of this bird in North Wales. The red¬ shank is common during the winter months all round the sea coast of North Wales. It very rarely comes inland, but Colonel Burton, of Eryl Aran, Bala, found a pair with very young birds, which had nested on his shootings near the Arenig in June. Colonel Burton is a keen naturalist, and an accurate observer. He told me his dog caught one of the young birds without doing it any injury, and that there cannot be any doubt about the identification of the bird. This is the only record, to my knowledge, of the redshank nesting in this district. Thos. Ruddy. The Gardens, Fal6 Corwen. NOTICES OF BOOKS Quin Abbey, than which " no finer monument of the days of Ireland's greatness is to be found," is described in the Beliquary and Illustrated Archaeo¬ logist for July, and the illustrations give us a good notion of the beauty of the ruins. Mr Syd¬ ney Hartland describes an "Inscribed Leaden Tablet found at Dymock in Gloucestershire," which illustrates the practice of magic in past days. The charm on the tablet is concocted from a book published in 1532, and its object is the banishment of a woman named Sarah Ellis. In another paper "the Historic Town of Youghal on the Blackwater" is described, and amongst the illustrations we have Sir Walter Raleigh's House at Youghal. " French Bakers' Tallies,"and the first of a series of articles on " the Evolution of the Tex¬ tile Industries," in which the origin and progress of spinning is related, complete the list of contents, except the usual Reviews and Notes on Arch£eology._ In the course of his remarks on spinning the writer says " the spindle and distaff was still in use in the more remote parts of Scotland until just recently, and even at the present time survives in Brit¬ tany." The writer of this notice saw this ancient method of spinning practised by several women in the Pyrenees a few weeks ago. Folk-Lore for June opens with " The History of Sindban and the Seven Wise Masters," translated for the first time from the Syriac, the oldest that has come down to us, into English. Mr R. E. Dennett gives a very interesting account of the ' Death and Burial of the Fiote " (the tribes that once formed the great kingdom of Congo'; and equally interesting is Miss Mary Kingsley's address on " the Fetish View of the Human Soul." Of belief in a great God, Miss Kingsley says— In every Negro and Bantu tribe I am personally ac¬ quainted with there has been a Great God above all gods believed in ; and I find the belief in this god mentioned by all travellers who have given any attention to African reli¬ gion, in those parts of Africa which I have not the plea- ure of knowing. I know some ot the greatest of our ethnologists doubt the existence of the idea of this God, and think he has been suggested into the African's mind. I think this is going too far, though I fully agree with them that he is not Jehovah, nor a reminiscence of Jehovah. But the study of this deity is exceedingly difficult, because the missionaries have identified him with Jehovah, and worked on the mind of the natives from this point, causing frequently a very strange confusion of ideas therein. The names under which you meet with this great Overlord of gods are many; among the Kru men, Nyiswa; among the Effeks, Abasibum; among the Ashantses and Fantees, Y'ankumpon; Nzam, Nzambi, Anzam, &c. among the Bantu tribes. But neither among Negroes nor Bantu will you anywhere find a cult of this god. He is held to ba the god that created men and all things material and many spirits, but not all, for you always find certain spirits regarded as being coeval with him and self-existent. This Nzam—to take the Fann's name for him—is regarded as taking no interest in those things he has created, leaving them to the dominion of lower spirits, over whom, however, he has power, if he choose to exert it; and to the management of these spirits whom he is in immediate touch with, the African turns his attention. It is only when he fails with tbem, when things go very badly, when the river rises higher than usual and sweeps away his home and his plantations, when the Spotted Death comes into the land, and day and night the corpses float down the river and he finds them jammed among his canoes and choking up his fish-traps, and when the death wail goes up night and day from his own village, then will the chief rise up and call upon this great Over-God to restrain the evil working ot the great Nature-spirits, in a terror maddened by despair: for he feels it will be in vain. And this of the plurality of souls is all we can give of Miss Kingsley's remarks on a profoundly interesting subject— Another point that is important is the plurality of souls to the individual. These are commonly held to be four : the human soul; the soul in an animal, never in a plant, in the bush ; the shadow on the path ; and the dream-soul. This subject is a very complex one. I think I may say I believe these four souls to be one central soul, the others being as it were, its senses, whereby it works while living in a body, for the dream-soul, bush-soul, and shadow-soul do not survive death. No customs are made for them at death; and if, during life, the intercommuni¬ cation of these souls with each other is in any way damaged, the essential central soul suffers, suffers to the extent sometimes of bodily death, but does not die itself. In a review of "Legendes et Curiosites des Metiers," we come across the following observation on a word used in Shropshire— The ropemakers form almost an outcast trade.especially in Brittany, where even in the present century they were even obliged to bury their dead apart. One would at once jump to the conclusion that this is a relic of racial hatred and of an ancient tribal trade, were it not for the former frequent employment of colonies of lepers in ropemaking. But, on the other hand, may not the lepers, as outcasts from society, have been driven to resort to outcast colonies of ropemakers ? The ropemakers are in Brittany cla&sed together with the knackers or offal butchers, under the name of caqueux, caquins, or cacous, which at once sug¬ gests the name of the pariahs of the Pyrenees, the cagots. It is curious, too, to i ecollect the reputation of the gipsies for eating unwholesome meat; and again, to find that in at least two English counties (Shropshire and Lincoln¬ shire) a buyer of diseased beasts is called a cag-butcher, and unwholesome meat cag-mag. Were these two trades originally practised by gipsies, or by some wandering tribe resembling them ? AUGUST 4, 1897. NOTES. SEVENTY fFOUR AND A COFFIN.— The following is from the Worcester Herald, and