Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/7



EDITORIAL.

INCE Mr. Thoms invented the term in 1846, Folk-lore has undergone a continual widening of its meaning and its reference. It was confined at first to the unconsidered trifles of popular thought and usage that go to make up the bulk of such books as Brand’s (or rather Bourn’s) Popular Antiquities. But it was soon found that these were only to be explained, if explained at all, by comparison with the larger and more definite products of the popular mind—the folk-tale, the folk-song, and the folk-institution—which in their turn formed the raw material, the protoplasm as it were, out of which Literature itself and the Institutions of the State were evolved. In short, Folk-lore has now been extended to include the whole vast background of popular thought, feeling, and usage, out of which and in contrast to which have been developed all the individual products of human activity which go to make up what is called History.

As the meaning of the term Folk-lore has expanded, so the relations of the science that studies its manifestations have extended, till it has been correlated with all the groups of organised studies that deal with the Past of Man. Folk-lore, in its investigations into popular belief, gives aid to, and receives help from, the cognate studies of Comparative Mythology and Comparative Religion. Folk-lore, in investigating popular usages, often finds traces of past