Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/67

 Rh the tradition of the Irish peasant and the tradition of the Maori no generic difference exists, but both are equally folklore, and in grasping the importance of folklore as thus conceived for any investigation into the past of the human race, the study of folklore has become frankly anthropological. It is no longer possible, even if it were desired, to draw a line between the science of folklore and that side of anthropology which deals with the earlier intellectual, spiritual, and institutional development of mankind. They are one and the same.

Along with this advance in the conception of folklore has gone an advance in the method of recording it. During the last twenty years the work of observation and collection all over the world has swollen our libraries to an alarming extent. Happily the quality of the materials thus brought together has also improved, though we still have only too much cause to harden our hearts, if not to roughen our tongues, against that impertinent person the writer of scraps, the man of scissors and paste, for whom any piece of gossip, or any apocryphal story tricked out with what he may be pleased to call graces of style or local colour, is folklore. Such a person brings discredit on folklore; and charity, or even patience, is a doubtful virtue in dealing with him. The advance in accuracy of record I am referring to has been specially productive in the case of savage peoples. The way has been led by the American Bureau of Ethnology, to whose detailed researches on the tribes of the western continent anthropology is so greatly indebted. In other quarters of the globe individual effort has followed this example. To confine our view to Australia, Mr. Howitt, Mr. Roth, and Messrs. Spencer and Gillen have revealed to us a new world of savage thought. The discoveries thus made have been promptly seized by inquirers into the history of human institutions and belief with the daring, but not always with the success, of a Cortes or a Pizarro. Their jarring theories and conflicting claims have raised the din of