Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/24

 16 Mr. C. G. Leland. I am certainly still inclined to think that it is one of the problems we must discuss in connection with continuity of custom and belief, but I do not think it will be found to prove so powerful a cause of continuity as the continuity of older races commingled with the higher.

In any case, it is clear that the continuity which is implied by the traditional survival of custom, belief, and myth, whether through the medium of the borrowing theory just propounded, or through continuity of the people who first brought the custom, belief, and myth into the country where they now are found, is an antagonistic hypothesis to spontaneous generation. Is it that my examples of this latter, and Mr. Lang's examples grouped so ably in his preface to Grimm's stories, are limited in their nature and scope by mere accident, or is it that they are not fairly represented? If they are fairly represented, then the theory which they illustrate cannot account for one tithe of the survivals of ancient and purely savage thought in folk-lore. Pretty or innocent ideas associated with superstition and custom might be allowed to have originated with people living under a civilised culture; but nasty and disgusting customs cannot be so allowed, except after the most exceptional proofs, and we must fall back upon the hypothesis of continuity from the times when savage thought was represented by savage culture and savage people. I put this case strongly, because it seems to be so strangely objected to by folk-lore students. Thus Mr. Jevons, in his beautiful edition of Plutarch's Roman Questions, puts the question point blank. "Mr. Gomme", he says, "argues that the fear of dead kindred was borrowed by the Aryans from the non-Aryan inhabitants of Europe. But why may not the pro-ethnic Aryans, as well as the savages, have had at one stage of their development a fear of dead kindred?"—a question arising simply from the fact that Mr. Jevons cannot bring himself to believe that the ancient Aryans ever borrowed any of the savage practices of the peoples