Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/32

 18 our methods of study which begin to make themselves heard will, I think, help to determine the answer.

For here and there it is whispered that our progress is not altogether sound. Voices from across the Channel begin to murmur that English anthropologists are going too fast. Ten years ago Monsieur Henri Hubert warned us against trying to discover the origins of traditional rites before we have ascertained the laws which govern them; in other words, against attempting to go direct to the source and omitting the intermediate history. Others, even among ourselves, tell us that we are proceeding on wrong methods, comparing recklessly, pulling up "items" of folklore by the roots to set them beside other items, similarly uprooted, from other social systems and other stages of culture. More discrimination, they say, is needed, more close examination of definite areas, more study of variations, and more enquiry into causes. The complaint against us amounts to this,—that we pay too much attention to similarities, and not enough to differences, and, further, that we confine our attention to the incident, ceremony, or saying itself, without taking environment into consideration. The following seems to be a case in point:—

In 1902, a correspondent writing to Folk-Lore (xiii., p. 171) recorded an Oxfordshire proverbial saying applied to a lazy man in the hayfield or harvest-field, or to "one as wouldn't work," viz.—"He's got the little white dog." On the strength of parallel expressions used in the north-east of France, he hastily added this saying to the vast memorial cairn of folklore erected to the honour of the Corn-spirit. But take the environment into consideration. This is one of the obscurely-worded metaphorical sayings in which country people delight. The metaphor is one of disease. "He's got the little white dog,"—as if it had been, he has got the yellow janders, the brown typhus, the