Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/38

 28 Normans may be taken as an example—the under-folk, ever find it hard to forget.

Change of meaning, then, regarded simply as a transvaluation, may in general be figured as a transverse movement or transference from one interest to another on the same plane of culture. Moreover, since each major interest can be conceived as made up of a number of minor interests similarly juxtaposed—ritual and dogma, for instance, being comprised in religion, dance and song in art, and so on — such a mode of representation may be indefinitely extended. It remains to note that, while we thus characterize the process from the standpoint of value, it is quite open to us to describe it simultaneously from a different standpoint, namely, that of cause. Let me, without attempting to be exhaustive, give a few examples of such causal ways of viewing change of meaning. Thus sometimes we can account for it as a process of modernization. Old songs are accommodated to new instruments. A mummers' play makes room for a popular hero of the day. Unfamiliar animals give way to familiar; as in my own part of the world, where a monstrous dog that still haunts the countryside can be proved by a place-name to have succeeded a werewolf. Under the same head, too, might be brought the far-reaching effects in the way of the reinterpretation of custom that are produced by the introduction of a new calendar. Again, there is the somewhat analogous process of acclimatization, when proximity in space, instead of proximity in time, enables new meanings to triumph over old. Thus the remarkable bird-cult of Easter Island, which Mr. and Mrs. Scoresby Routledge have recently made known to us, now centres round the Sooty tern or "Wideawake," thanks to the fact that this species alone is locally abundant. It is a fair deduction, however, from the thick-hooked beak and gular pouch of certain of the birdlike figures sculptured on the rocks, that we have here to do with an immigrant rite originally inspired by the