Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/320

 314 discovered. Hitherto, the likenesses of the folk-lore of the different localities have been the chief object of study—its differences have yet to be examined. The theory of “survivals” has been established; it has been proved that sundry stories, customs, and ideas prevalent among savage peoples are to be found also among civilised nations. But folk-lore has a great deal more to teach us than simply the phenomenon of “survival in culture”, and I will venture to say that the study of its variations in England (what they are, where they are found, and, so far as possible, how they came to pass) will throw such a light, not only on English history, but on early history in general, and on the nature and history of folk-lore itself, as was hardly guessed at even so lately as the period when our Society was founded.

But to accomplish this we must have a great deal more collecting. A good deal of matter has been recorded, it is true, but it is unsystematic, patchy, incomplete. Much of it is scattered up and down the volumes of Notes and Queries, of the Transactions of Archæological Societies, of local glossaries and handbooks, and is practically inaccessible to anyone who wants to know whether a given item occurs in a given locality. Few even of our best local collections cover the whole range of folk-lore subjects, and many counties, including some of the most interesting—Somerset, Kent, Norfolk, Derbyshire, Cumberland—are scarcely represented at all.

I.—To begin with, then, we need a careful geographical examination of the habitats and boundaries of the various items of English folk-lore, such as the English Dialect Society has made and is making of dialectal boundaries. The results which may be expected from the comparison of such a record of English folk-lore with the evidence obtained from other lines of study, seem to open a vista of possible discovery which I can but glance at, and on which I will not speculate.

There is nothing like speaking from experience, so, at