Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/31

Rh abstracted from their social context. Which way is the better is a question that well-nigh answers itself." Following the same doctrine, an American writer, Mr. W. D. Wallis, urges that the method by which anthropological material should be collected must be both comparative and intensive, the latter term implying that "no result is of any value unless you have carefully and, so far as possible, exhaustively, treated the particular case with which you are engaged. It will not be sufficient to say that you have found such and such correspondences and such and such differences. This is little worth unless you go further and ascertain how far these may be held to be the total of correspondences and the total of differences; and, perhaps more important still, to what extent these similarities are more than mere correspondences and represent really efficient factors."<refThe American Anthropologist, vol. xiv. (1912), pp. 179-80. As a natural corollary to these doctrines the new school discards what is termed "the naive scheme of world-wide unilinear evolution," and pleads the necessity for a regional survey of the beliefs and practices of backward races, such sociological monographs being alone capable of serving as the basis of sounder comparative studies. Combined with these suggestions for enquiry, we find increased importance attributed to the interaction of the members of the group, the concentrated emotion of the kin, as the seed-bed of belief and usage.

Our dependence upon regional surveys of modern savage life involves a certain risk which deserves consideration. The types of societies which are capable of investigation fall into two groups: first, those of which we can acquire knowledge from the stores of a national, historical literature; secondly, those which we are able to examine only in the light of their present condition, and much of this, in the absence of material illustrating their evolution in the past, is necessarily obscure. For example, it is only in the case of a certain group of races, like those of ancient Egypt,