Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/241

Rh country in Europe in which folk-lore methods have made so little impression on students of classical antiquities. In the two numbers of the dictionary last issued there are three articles of importance to folk-lorists : Dionysia, Dioscuri, and Divinatio. M. Reinach, the writer of the article Dioscuri, is indeed not ignorant of what has been done from the side of folk-lore on his subject. He can even quote, from La Mythologie par Andrew Lang, parallels to the Dioscuri amongst the aboriginal Australians and the Bushmen. But, alas ! he only quotes them as curiosities. With the article Divinatio, which is a marvellously comprehensive collection of material, things are still worse. The numerous survivals still extant of primitive methods of forecasting the future are not quoted even à titre de curiosité. And, what is worse, the writer deliberately declines to consider parallels from other nations than the Greeks, Romans, and Etruscans, on the ground that so much are all nations alike in these beliefs that study of other peoples would probably only add a multitude of facts similar to those already known to the classical students, but would not open up any new points of view ! Consistently enough, M. Bouché-Leclerq's method is purely à priori: grant him a couple of propositions which are self-evident to educated man of the nineteenth century, and he will deduce from them the faith in divination in all its branches. And yet if there is a thing which civilised educated man can not do, it is to say à priori how things will strike the savage mind. For illustration we need go no further than M. Bouché-Leclerq's fundamental assumptions, viz., that all we require to assume in order to believe in divination is that the gods are able to communicate information, and that being able they are willing. But M. Bouché-Leclerq has at the very beginning overlooked a contingency which is not unknown in savage experience, however unlikely to occur à priori to a modern savant : the gods may not be willing. In