Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/182

152 but contain a warning of permanent importance to anthropologists, especially to those of them who study savages at a safe distance, and have never perhaps seen one of them in their lives, though they may possibly have watched their images dancing silently in a cinematograph or heard the echo of their voices chanting and whooping out of a phonograph, I will quote the passage entire for their benefit. Mr. Fison said: "In these investigations two things mainly are required—first, a patient continuance in the collecting of facts; and, secondly, the faculty of seeing in them what is seen by the natives themselves. We must ever remember that our mind-world is very different from theirs. It is not filled with the same images; it is not governed by the same laws. It is to theirs as the England of the present day is to the England of who shall say how many ages ago? The climate, the coast line, the watersheds, the flora, the fauna—in short, nearly all the aspects of nature—are changed. It is to all intents and purposes another land. As to the former of these two requisites, one's natural tendency, especially in the beginning of the work, is to form a theory as soon as one has got hold of a fact; and, as to the latter, we are too apt to look at the facts in savagery from the mental standpoint of the civilised man. Both of these are extremely mischievous. They lead investigators into fatal mistakes, and bring upon them much painful experience; for the pang attending the extraction of an aching double tooth is sweetest bliss when compared with the tearing up by the roots of a cherished theory. I speak feelingly here, because I can hold myself up as an awful warning against theory-making. To take one instance only. In Kamilaroi and Kurnai, the joint work of Mr. A. W. Howitt and myself, there is a long chapter containing a most beautiful theory of the Kurnai system, which I worked out with infinite pains. It accounts for that system so completely and so satisfactorily that the Kurnai ought to be ashamed of