Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/19

Rh I shall not to-night attempt to give the explanation I am inclined to hold is the correct one, but I put these preliminary questions in order to ask the far more important one as to what we are to do with such specimens of folk-lore—a question which takes us in fact to the second great landmark in our studies, namely, the point where we may properly commence the work of comparison. Having picked out any item of folk-lore, are we immediately to rush off into foreign lands inhabited by barbarous and by savage people, seeking for analogues? My answer is decidedly not. We must first of all treat of them as survivals in British folk-lore, and we must ascertain their place in British folk-lore, their relationship to other customs and beliefs extant among the same people or within the same geographical area.

Each folk-lore item, in point of fact, has a life-history of its own, and a history of its place in relationship to other items. Just as the biography of each separate word in our language has been investigated in order to get at Aryan speech as the interpretation of Aryan thought, so must the biography of each custom, superstition, or story be investigated in order to get at Aryan belief or something older than Aryan belief. We must try to ascertain whether each item represents primitive belief by direct descent, by symbolisation, or by changes which may be discovered by some law equivalent to Grimm's law in the study of language. Patient research must be the method of the future, and we must leave off poetising about folk-lore, and commence to arrange it in statistical columns; nay, there will be poetry in this even, for from such statistics may be recovered some of the lost ideals and aspirations of our prehistoric ancestors.

Such statistics will reveal some characteristics of folk-lore, which, so far as I know, have never yet been taken count of One very important characteristic is the prevalence of a particular belief attached to different objects in different places. It will be in the recollection of those