Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/28

20 looked or not accurately allowed for in the process of making the "calculation". This seems to me to illustrate best what has been going on in the study of this branch of folk-lore, and, indeed, of all branches. We have calculated what the various magnitudes of folk-lore are expected to be. We have "expected them to be" sun-myths and dawn-myths; the results of diseased language; the heritage of a race whose Aryan name is not the only portion of its attributes which has been created by the fancy of scholars. We have expected them to be diluted literature, and, most strange, literature diluted with savagery. We have "expected them to be" the outcome of the Roman genius for organisation and rule. Indeed, our calculations are as numerous as our expectations. But the measurement of the "expected" magnitudes with the "actual" magnitudes is a portion of the work yet to be undertaken seriously. In some slight way I have attempted such a measurement in the case of village institutions, and when I found that the measurement did not fit, I sought for the agent which had been overlooked or not accurately allowed for, in ethnology. But though I have had a patient hearing, though some scholars have been able to accept my treatment, if not all my conclusions, other scholars in England, in France, and lately in India, are impatient of my exaggerated use, as they term it, of the phenomena of survival in English institutions. But my use of survivals is the use sanctioned by folk-lore, and if I have exaggerated it in its application to institutions, so have all folk-lorists exaggerated it in other branches of their study. Those who raise the cry of exaggeration, however, do not attempt to explain the presence of survivals at all. When they hear that the freemen of the corporation of Alnwick used formerly to be initiated by being dragged through a well on the town common, they prefer to believe the silly legend about King John having instituted the ceremony because he was once ducked there himself. It is an axiom of philologists that