Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/166

 1 38 Ethnological Data in Folklore.

custom or belief occupying a place in the cultus of a barbaric or savage people, we may then, and only then, discuss its right to a genealogy which can be traced back to a pre- historic cultus of the same stage of development as that of modern barbarism or savagery. This right will depend upon several important conditions. The custom in question must in the first place be not a single isolated example of such a possible genealogy, but must be found associated with several other customs, each of which, being treated in exactly the same manner, has been found to exhibit exactly the same relationship to the same barbaric or savage cultus or religion. In this way, classification and analysis go hand in hand as the necessary methods of studying sur- vivals. Without analysis we cannot properly arrive at a classification of examples ; without classification we can- not work out the genealogy of survivals. The argument for detecting in modern survivals the last fragments of a once prevailing system based upon this extensive ground- work is of itself a very strong one, and can only be upset by one counter-argument. This is nothing less than proof that no such system ever existed, or could have possibly existed, in the country or among the people, where and among which the survivals have been discovered. Clearly the burden of such a proof could hardly be supported ; for the very fact of the existence of such survivals becomes in itself one of the strongest arguments for the existence of the original system from which they descended, and of the race or people among whom such original system obtained For the British Association meeting I then surveyed by this process of analysis and classification, the fire customs surviving in Britain, and I carefully kept clear of any ter- minology which was not actually justified by the circum- stances of each individual example or group of examples. But it was undoubted that the facts as quoted all tended in one direction, namely to the connection of the fire customs with the family, and through the family to some unit