Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/24

16 I cannot help expressing the opinion that, when tested by the evidence of folk-lore, those attributes of our ancestors which do happen to have been noted will be found to belong not to isolated peculiarities of a barbarous people, but to a definite stage of human culture, will supply the key to that stage, and will find ample illustration in the culture of modern savages. Thus my point is that the doubts of the historian can be removed only by the researches of the folk-lorist. He would have no misgivings about accepting early records when he finds that the records of almost modern times contain fragments of custom and belief whose ancestry is plainly traceable to the savagery depicted in the early records; and of this there is ample evidence.

These questions as to items of culture belonging to a system of which they are only the indicators, lead me to the third important landmark in the study of folk-lore. This has come to the front since the Congress held last autumn at Burlington House. I mean the place held by customs and institutions as a section of folk-lore.

We have frequently been called "A Fairy-tale Society". I do not object to the title as such, because I love the fairy tales which form part of our stock-in-trade. But I object to it as a title equivalent to folk-lore. In my own mind I have long considered customs and institutions to be properly a section of folk-lore, but it was not until last autumn that any official sanction, so to speak, was given to such an idea. How far is that idea going to be accepted by folk- lorists is the question I am anxious to see settled.

At the present moment the subject is in somewhat a chaotic condition. Students of folk-lore have pretty generally ignored customs and institutions; and the inattention has been returned with a vengeance. Folk-lore has long been in the habit of looking far afield for the elements necessary for its elucidation—it has ascended the stream of time and seized hold of what fragments there are of ancient faiths and ancient legend; it has penetrated into the lands of savage races, and has shocked the susceptibilities