Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/426

 386 TJie Folklore in the Legends of the Patijab.

ago, and succeeded in bringing out fifty-nine legends out of one hundred and eighteen collected, at intervals, which in latter years have I fear been very long ones. Now, besides the value of the collection for local historical purposes and for the linguistic forms in which many of them are conveyed, they present a pretty complete view of the machinery of Indian folktales. The extent to which they actually do so can be gauged by experts from the typical tables to be found in the course of my remarks, and drawn up on the lines just indicated; and I would like to say that I believe that as extensive parallel tables could be made out of the Tiiluva Devil- Worship and Hindustani Proverbs, and much completer ones from the Indian Antiquary and from the Indian Notes and Queries, both of my own series and Mr. Crooke's. It is my hope that the tables will bring home to some of my readers what a wide and fruitful field any given collection of Indian tales affords; how well worth indexing they are for those who seek to get at the roots of the genuine lore of the folk in any portion of the world.

Now the so-called faculties of the human mind, despite their apparent diversity, are in reality very limited in extent, and are referable to quite a few radical capacities. Those of attention and co-ordination will be found to cover most of the others that have names. Thus memory and observa- tion are both referable to attention, and so are mathematics, logic, and grammar to co-ordination. Indeed mankind, though unaware of it, talks mathematically, for the facts of speech can be actually stated clearly in terms of mathematics. And now when tracing the ideas of folklore by apparently natural processes to their roots, I soon found myself harking back to grammar with the main divisions of subject and predicate ; the matter to talk about and the conversation thereon. The "subject" divides itself into the hero and heroine, and the " predicate " into the commencement, the incidents, and the conclusion. But here all approach to