Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/40

 28 a common language and some common mythological conceptions. The latest authorities even refuse to admit the existence of a personal high god, or sky father, among these tribes before their dispersal. "It is likely enough," says Dr. Rice Holmes, the latest and best authority, "that the greater gods whom the Celts worshipped and who, variously imagined and with various names, were the common heritage of the Aryan-speaking peoples, were in part descended from deities who were not Aryan, and were adored in Britain in a somewhat different spirit before the first Celt landed on the Kentish shore." But this is a question which remains, and probably will remain, doubtful.

The result of these considerations is to emphasize the difficulty of tracing a connection between the beliefs current among our peasantry and those of the races who occupied these islands before the dawn of history. We must hesitate to accept any efforts to project our conceptions of the psychology of backward races in our time into a far distant past, for the reconstruction of which we possess no adequate materials. This evidence is practically confined to the mobilier of interments, and, though the cult of the dead is of supreme interest, the absence of all evidence of primitive social organisation and of birth and marriage rites prevents us from reaching a full interpretation of those forces which swayed the mind of the primitive savage.

In these islands we possess no materials for a survey of the beliefs of palæolithic man, and little advance for our purpose is to be gained by a comparison of his material culture with that of people like the Tasmanians, who lived in a quite different environment, except an inference, based upon our general experience of savage life, that no tribe is destitute of the elements of religion. In southern France the implements and ornaments found with the dead in the Mentone caves, the rock carvings and paintings, the coloured pebbles and bull-roarers, suggest, on the analogy of similar