Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/428

 400 environment and fall back upon the lower. Their intellects or their limited opportunities are thus operated upon by the same outside influences as operated upon their savage or primitive ancestors, and thus produce the same results or continue the same ideas.

Superstition is not always inherited. It is also created. Thus, as I pointed out in my book, when the Suffolk peasant set himself to work to account for the origin of the so-called "pudding stone" conglomerate, and decided that it was a mother stone and the parent of the pebbles, he was beginning a first treatise on geology in the terms of his environment. A child thinks and acts in terms of his nursery, his school, or his playground, and the grown-ups think in the terms of their family, their farm, or other industry. When this thought is shut out from the influence of science, it harps back to the primitive, reproducing an existing idea with which it can most easily assimilate, or formulating a new idea on precisely the old lines.

I do not know whether I have succeeded in making my meaning clear, but the conclusion I have come to, as a student of folk-lore, is that the impressions of the surrounding life have not been sufficiently regarded in their influence upon primitive thought, and this neglect of a very important factor in anthropological science has prevented us from seeing that tradition is an external product operating on the human mind, instead of an inheritance from folkmemory.

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(Ante, p. 27.)

The village of Bromley, Staffordshire, can be traced back into the tenth century, some years earlier than the date given by Miss Burne. In 993 Ethelred II. gave it to one Wulfric, who is no doubt identical with Wulfric "Spot," whose gift of it to Burton