Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/47

 Rh and so on. But in such cases we can do little more than speculate on the external influences, the psychological ideas, which may from time to time have caused change, development, decay, or survival of belief or custom. On the other hand, where historical records are forthcoming, we can go a good way towards actually ascertaining these things. We can say with tolerable confidence that the special form of the May festival at Castleton was caused by the political leanings of the people and the special idiosyncrasy of their clerical guide, at a time of political and religious stress; that the special form and continued existence of the morris dance at Abbot's Bromley is due to the local form of land tenure; that the effect of centuries of struggle between communal and individual rights in land may be traced in the jealous maintenance of perfectly useless privileges which takes shape in the squirrel-hunts. The analogy of this and other such evidence should assist our judgment as to the varied forms assumed by the institutions of savagery. Thirty years ago, we studied savage customs to explain European survivals; now we need to study European survivals to understand the developments of savage customs.

This is a point which I do not think has hitherto been sufficiently recognized. Sociology is the coming study of the immediate future, but sociologists seem not yet to realize that European folklore is the missing link, the bridge over the gulf, between savagery on one side and culture on the other. As was feelingly observed in my hearing not long ago, it is a far cry from the slums of East London to the Australian marriage system, and it is difficult to get young sociologists, eager to remedy the evils of the former, to spend time and patience in mastering the intricacies of the latter. The folklore of Europe shows the bearing of the one branch of study on the other, if only it is considered, not as a set of barren facts, but as the rungs of the ladder by which we