Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/254

248 sadly beaten in breach by a school, the tenets of which, if accepted, would reduce our Celtic and Teutonic forefathers to a lower stage of development than that of the contemporary Australian. For I do not know that anyone has essayed to deny the latter’s claim to the mythic conceptions which, with his clan and family rules, make up his religion. But as well-nigh every fragment of mythic or heroic fancy found amongst the Teutons (it is against their mythology, as being best known, that the attack has been chiefly directed) has been set down as borrowed from Greco-Roman culture, whether Pagan or Christian, it would indeed seem that our barbaric ancestors must, when they came in contact with ancient civilisation, have occupied as low a place in the culture scale as any we know of. M. Cerquand’s articles are a protest, the more valuable because it is implicit, against these doctrines. They demonstrate, upon an important point, that similarity of Celtic and Teutonic myth which we should naturally expect, and they demonstrate it by the analysis of documents—sermons of Christian apologists, decisions of synods, official citations of or references to local usage—which are above all suspicion, and against which none of the arguments urged against purely mythological texts are valid.

The transition from the Continental to the Brythonic branch of the insular Celts is easy. Professor Rhys has again affirmed the view held by the majority of scholars, that the Gaulish tribes (at least those ruling classes among them which came in contact with Rome) and the Brythons belong to a secondary wave of Celtic settlement throughout the west of Europe, and he has connected this wave with the Dorian settlement in Greece, and with the entry of the Oscan tribes into Italy. His arguments are