Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/89

Rh and above that is our duty to provide for the preservation of the memory, and not merely of the memory of perishing races under our sway, and of stages of culture in process of transformation or total disappearance within our borders, but also of as full a record as may be of what they were and what they signified in the history of the world. To do so will add to our imperial glory; and we are just now very jealous of that. Moreover, it will assist us to interpret our own past, and the prehistoric monuments in our own islands. I need not remind this Society of the traces of animal-worship lingering here and there in our midst. They were discussed some years ago by Mr. Gomme and Mr. Lang, when the question was debated whether totemism was a stage of our own development. They have been lately considered in the same connection by Mr. N. W. Thomas, likewise a member of the Society, in the Revue de l'Histoire des Religions. To take another instance, the famous barrow of Willy Howe in Yorkshire, and other barrows where it was clear that no human remains had ever been interred, were long an insoluble riddle to archaeologists. And so they would have been still, but for Dr. Frazer's investigations into savage rites of burial and theories of the soul, and Mr. Geo. Coffey's ingenious and satisfactory application of the results of these investigations to the barrows of the Bronze Age. For the human mind everywhere travels in the same direction and causes men to act in analogous ways. Hence, when we are inquiring into matters as remote from our immediate surroundings as the totemism of the Arunta, or the mock-funerals of Vancouver Island, it may well be that we are unconsciously throwing a searchlight on the dark places of our own antiquity.

I could say more. I could claim for the study of the traditions of savage races a still higher function in the economy of thought. It is needless. "The original of ancient customs," Dr. Johnson declared, "is commonly