Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/50

 38 Presidential Address.

groping among the dry bones of methods of investigation and the problems of origins. It is ahnost time for us to cease to follow the will-o'-the-wisp of speculation when so much remains to be done which is well within the powers of those to whom the philosophy of folklore seems vain and unprofitable. We have, in the first place, to infuse a new spirit of activity in the work of collection. We have still many fields unoccupied, for example, that of prehistoric folklore, which is practically untouched. Material is being gradually collected which will, in time, throw light upon the beliefs of man not only in the neolithic but even in the palaeolithic period. M. ]keuil and other anthropologists have discovered wall paintings and even figures in the round in the caves of southern Europe, and their significance is brought nearer to us by the identification of similar records, dating apparently from the Aurignacian period, in the Welsh cave. Bacon's Hole.-^^ These discoveries much extend our knowledge, which was hitherto largely confined to the mobilier of interments. In this enquiry we shall be assisted by the identification suggested by Professor Sollas of the now extinct Tasmanians with the Chelleans, the Australians with the Mousterians, the Bushmen with the Aurignacians, the Eskimo with the Alagdalenian people.^*^ The representations of animal hunts in. these caves point to a form of magic intended to secure a supply of food. The rudely carved and painted stones laid with the dead may be the prototypes of the steatopygous figures of the neo- lithic period. It has even been suggested that from some of the cave decorations a rite like the Intichiuma, to use the inaccurate term of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, may have

^* The 7'iuies, Oct. 141I1, 1912. Abbe Breuil, in his recently delivered lectures, confirms the attribution of these drawings to the Aurignacian period. 7'he Times, Feb. Ilth, 1913.

^^ \V. J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives, pp. 252, 368-9, etc.; A. Mossb, The Daivn of Mediterranean Civilisation, pp. 14S <r/ se(j.