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While we cannot expect that those whose function in our society it is to investigate crimes and determine the guilt or innocence of those accused of them will exactly relish the many comparisons which this book draws between their own activities and those of the primitives of Central Australia and elsewhere when confronted with similar problems, we should be surprised if the book should not prove to be a source of passim pleasure and instruction to psycho-analysts, criminologists, jurists, anthropologists, and, indeed, to all serious students of the mental sciences. (Less exalted, but numerically superior, the writers and readers of detective fiction may be tempted on the strength of a complete chapter on Van Dine's Canary Murder Case to hear what an analyst has to say about the unconscious sources of their own special interest.) The material to which the psycho-analytic microscope is here for the first time applied possesses of itself an unusual fascination, the results reached are both illuminating and suggestive, and analysts, at any rate, may well feel gratified at the persistent expansion of their science, of which this book is but a further example.
It is not often that direct evidence is available to convict a criminal. Besides, human testimony is notoriously unreliable in these matters, far more so, apparently, than that of inanimate objects (sachliche Indizien), e.g. shadows on a photograph, cigarette ends, etc., etc. Delving into anthropological and folkloristic sources, the author finds there many interestingly close parallels with the modern utilization of this material. Thus, to take but one example out of many, our Holmses and Poirots and