5 NOVEMBER 1927, Page 34

SOME NIGERIAN FERTILITY CULTS. By P. Amaury Talbot. (Oxford University

Press. 12s. 6d.)—Mr. Talbot, whose great work on The Peoples of Southern Nigeria has won him distinction among ethnologists, describes in this monograph a special aspect of the primitive religion of the Ibo and Ijaw tribes in South-Eastern Nigeria. He was stationed there some years ago and had facilities for obtaining photo- graphs and details of the shrines and other objects of veneration. He mention& that the District Commissioner had to interfere with one notorious ." Juju," whose priest kept three hundred girls as prostitutes and, besides trafficking in their shame, insisted that the children to whom they gave birth should be murdered or exposed. The folk-tales recorded in these pages are fascinating revelations of the primitive mind.