Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/89

Rh especially? For my part I have not been trained to distinguish flat-footed people, so I do not recollect noticing any in the Isle of Man; but, granting there may be a small proportion of such people in the Island, does it not seem to you strange that they should have their importance so magnified as this superstition would seem to do? I must confess that I cannot understand it, unless we have here also some supposed racial characteristic, let us say greatly exaggerated. To explain myself I should put it that the non-Aryan aborigines were a small people of great agility and nimbleness, and that their Aryan conquerors moved more slowly and deliberately, whence the former, of springier movements, might come to nickname the latter the flat-feet. It is even conceivable that there was some amount of foundation for it in fact. If I might speak from my own experience, I might mention a difficulty I have often had with shoes of English make, namely, that I have always found them, unless made to my measure, apt to have their instep too low for me. It has never occurred to me to buy ready-made shoes in France or Germany, but I know a lady as Welsh as myself who has often bought shoes in France, and her experience is, that it is much easier for her to get shoes there to fit her than in England, and for the very reason which I have already suggested, namely, that the instep in English shoes is lower than in French ones. These two instances do not warrant an induction that the Celts are higher in the instep than Teutons, and that they have inherited that characteristic from the non-Aryan element in their ancestry; but they will do to suggest a question, and that is all I want: Are the descendants of the non-Aryan aborigines of these islands proportionately higher in the instep than those of more purely Aryan descent ?

There is one other question which I should like to ask before leaving the qualtagh, namely, as to the relation of the custom of New Year's gifts to the belief