Page:A book of folk-lore (1913).djvu/12

Rh it is to differentiate the strata at which lie the remains of ancient man.

The same may be said with regard to folk-lore. A great amount had been collected into heaps, but no attempt had been made on a large scale to sift and sort out what had been found, and determine to what layer in our population they belong. The grouping is of the crudest. Birth, marriage, death lore go into their several piles, so do ghost and witch stories, and tales of dwarfs. What we really want to know is, Whence came the several items found?

Here, in Great Britain, we form an amalgam of several distinct races, and each race has contributed something towards the common stock of folk-lore. In my own neighbourhood we have two distinct types of humanity: one with high cheekbones, dusky skin, dark hair, full of energy, unscrupulous as to the meum and tuum, money-making, by every conceivable means. The other is fair-haired, clear-skinned, slow, steady, honourable, with none of the alertness of the other. I can point out a family: the eldest girl, illegitimate, is wild, indisciplinable, dark-haired, and sallow-skinned, The mother, of the same type, married a fair-haired man, and the children are of mixed breed.