Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/148

140 but the state of culture. Thus the distaste for horseflesh in England is said to be a survival of the worship of Odin, to whom the horse was sacred, or even of an earlier stage when the horse was a totem. Hence there is a tendency to use such a survival as a proof of former existence in this country, either of the worship of Odin, or of the existence of a totemistic stage of society. But this leaves out of account the possibility—nay, the probability—that this and other survivals have been introduced into this country when they had already arrived at the stage of survivals. For surely it is of the essence of folk-lore custom that it is handed on without a consciousness of the original belief which gave rise to the custom. Thus, I throw salt over my left-shoulder if I am unlucky enough to spill it, without being in the slightest degree able to give a reason for my so doing; indeed, it is because I cannot give a reason that I do it, in so far as I am superstitious. Now that custom I have taken from my mother and my nurse, or my uncle, or my aunt, or from some foreigner with whom I have become intimate. What criterion have we to distinguish between what I would call vertical, in contradistinction to lateral, tradition? An Englishman of the Middle Ages sees his father and relatives performing this salt-throwing because they have seen their fathers do it: that is vertical tradition. But as we find this salt-throwing a custom throughout Europe, it must also at one time or another have been passed from one country to another, or from one district to another, by one or more persons in each case. When this was first adopted in any one district, not from parents or relatives, but from strangers who may have become relatives, that will be a case of lateral tradition. Now what criterion has been discovered to distinguish between vertical and lateral tradition? I can see none: and until some such criterion has been discovered I cannot see how we can use tradition for ethnological purposes. Thus I correlate my heresy with regard to the anthropological evidence to be derived from folk-tales,