Item 218 - Copy letter from W. Baldwin Spencer to J. G. Frazer

Melbourne. Dated Sept. 7, 1906 - [A. W.] Howitt has shown him a letter from Professor Rhys in which he notes that often in fairy stories all the fairies are women, and believes that this must be a very primitive idea; notes that [Andrew] Lang has ridiculed the idea of 'savages' not being astonished at a community of women; believes that the old folk custom of women who go to shrines to become fertile and the saying that babies came from the parsley bed are based on the same essential idea of conception as the Arunta; he has told Howitt that it is 'his sacred ethnologic duty to punch, pound and pulverize [Lang] until he hasn't a whole bone in his body'