Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/93

Rh once visited in the interval by a British warship. In 1830 an attempt was made by the London Missionary Society to get a footing on the island. This, we may be tolerably certain, was the earliest time at which any real social intercourse with Europeans took place. After a struggle, the missionaries were successful, and gradually succeeded in Christianizing the people. Now, the Samoan ballad replaces the paternal ogre by a god; and it bespeaks a condition of thought when gods are believed to hold constant communion with men, and are, indeed, hardly distinguishable from them. In view of this fact, and of the other details of manners and scenery, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the ballad has descended from the times of heathen savagery. If this be true—and Dr. Turner indicates no doubt about it—a very heavy onus probandi lies upon Mr. Newell, having regard to the history of the island—an onus to be outweighed by no theories of what must have been.

I may digress a moment here to mention that Dr. Turner's book affords other problems of the same sort. There is, for instance, a proverb in daily use referring to a fable familiar to us as "The Hare and the Tortoise". The fable in Samoa relates a quarrel between a fowl and a turtle for a spring of fresh water. They agreed to decide it by seeing which of them was first at the spring the next morning. The turtle, of course, got up early, and reached the spring from the sea before the fowl, in her over-confidence, had done roosting. Note here the complete assimilation by the native mind of this apologue, as shown not merely by its adaptation to the island scenery and fauna, but also by the proverb continually in the mouths of the people. Can we venture to assume that it, too, "must have been" a recent importation from Europe?

Mr. MacRitchie's paper on The Historical Aspect of Folk-lore calls attention to a very difficult branch of the inquiry into the meaning of the folk-tale. Some of the instances he gives of the preservation of historical memory are curious,