Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/530

 5o6 Reviews.

it is safer to regard and study them rather as the live, if secon- dary, products of a mentality which nevertheless contains so much hard-headedness that I should be sorry for an agnostic American dealer who thought he could get the better of a Guernsey farmer over the price of a cow.

A great deal is heard nowadays of the ethnological method which is going to explain, as it were, the stratigraphy of custom, the layers of belief that liave been deposited in the mind of a people by successive visitations from without. Thus, in the Guernsey instance we could at least infer that the cycle of ideas that in Italy finds expression in the presepio had reached the island, — that, in short, the islanders were Christians who had heard the story of the babe born in Bethlehem. But if this line of interpretation is important, as enabling us to resolve questions of culture-contact, it can neither replace nor invalidate the use of a psychological method serving other and perhaps more ultimnte purposes of anthropological science. From the strictly psycho- logical point of view, the metaphor of mental stratigraphy is dangerous. Locke fell into bad mistakes when he compared the human mind to an " empty cabinet." Neither, then, can we with safety compare it to an empty cave, in which one set of in- habitants after another deposits its leavings. These contributions from various external sources are assimilated by the mind of the folk as an active, selective agency. Mr. Miles has perhaps done well not to concern himself too nicely with the endless problems relating to the ethnological provefiance of the ceremonies that go to make the European Christmas what it is. Such matters call for special treatment ; but this book, perhaps, was hardly the place. By putting together his very varied and picturesque materials in effective masses he affords the reader a concrete impression of what Christmas still means for the more naive of those who in general enjoy the same psychological climate with ourselves. By learning thus how the past is constantly assimilated by the pre- sent, we may learn not only to understand Christmas better, but perhaps also to appreciate it the more.

R. R. Mareti.