Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/50

 1 8 Presidential Address.

in the g^round, hidden among remote tribes, or contained ev^en in ordinary books, to say nothing of the thousands of vokimes of forgotten histories and travels."^ For the rest, he suggests in prophetic vein that " it is possible that the ethnographer may some day feel himself justified in giving to this kind of argument a far wider range "^ — nameh-, the argument relating to the propagation of customs. Even at the time when he wrote his first ethnological treatise, historical connexions loomed invitingly on all sides. " On the whole," he sums up, "it does not seem to be _an unrea- sonable, or even over-sanguine view, that the mass of analogies in art and knowledge, mythology and custom, confused and indistinct as they at present are, may already be taken to indicate that the civilisations of many races, whose history even the evidence of language has not suc- ceeded in bringing into connexion, have really grown up under one another's influences, or derived common material from a common source." ^°

Yet Tylor's name will always be associated with the evolutionary method, seeing that his most famous generaliza- tions have been reached by its aid. Let us see how this came about. Now, his interest throughout lay, not in the cultural history of particular societies, much less in the history of individual culture-makers, but in the history of human culture in general. Numberless uniformities are displayed by primitive culture as a whole, and, somewhat less obviously, by various wholesale levels or stages that can be distinguished within it. Some of these unifor- mities might be due to accident, and a great many are undoubtedly the result of the borrowing of customs. But there remain other similarities which, in Tylor's view, are to be accounted for by direct reference to that similarity of mind which up to a certain point all human beings_al_ike display. Thus, in so far as a given feature of cuj ture c an

^ Keseanhcs into the Early History of Mankind^, 175. ^Ib. 377. '-/'''• 379.