Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/33

Rh Anthropological methods are laborious and lengthy. Each item must be carefully collated with its surroundings, its parallels and its originals. We are gradually doing this. Mr. Campbell, years ago, set us on the right lines; Mr. Lang has shown us some of the results that may be expected. And yearly, in our own transactions, in studies like those of Mr. Hartland, Mr. Clodd, Mr. Nutt, and outside our own circle, but assisted by us as I firmly believe, studies like Mr. Frazer's Golden Bough and Professor Robertson Smith's Religion of the Semites, the evidence for the anthropological school of folk-lore is gradually but surely accumulating. It is the production of evidence all along the line that is so much needed. As this is accomplished we shall see that such an example, for instance, as the use of stone celts in witchcraft is not isolated or peculiar. Such stone implements in the British Isles, as among savage people, are called lightning stones, and they are, as Mr. Hickson says, but one example out of many which help to support the view that the fundamental ideas of primitive man are the same all the world over. "Just as the little black baby of the negro, the brown baby of the Malay, the yellow baby of the Chinaman, are in face and form, in gestures and habits, as well as in the first articulate sound they mutter, very much alike, so the mind of man, whether he be Aryan or Malay, Mongolian or Negrito, has, in the course of its evolution, passed through stages which are practically identical. In the intellectual childhood of mankind natural phenomena, or some other causes, of which we are at present ignorant, have induced thoughts, stories, legends, and myths, that in their essentials are identical among all the races of the world with which we are acquainted." (Hickson's North Celebes, 240.)

There is no room for the borrowing theory if this be the true way of looking at folk-lore. But there is another point to notice. Mr. Jacobs has, in the third number of our Journal, very ingeniously and suggestively introduced us to