Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/53

 Rh invention of facts outside all human experience. It is a transposition of one set of facts to another locale; or a general mix-up of several sets of originally independent facts; or simply an exaggerated way of saying that melons grow very large in Eastern Europe; but it is not invention.

I do not think that the reference from myth to fact is quite acknowledged as a doctrine of the science of folk-lore. It is too often the practice to characterise a particular belief as "mere superstition", a particular action as "mere custom", a particular tradition as a mere fragment of literature borrowed somehow from somewhere at some time or other; and then to think that the whole inquiry about the superstition, custom, or tradition is settled once for all. Our late distinguished President is, I hold, a sinner in this respect. In his last address from this chair he criticised a study of mine on Totemism in Britain, upon the basis that particular items of belief, which I classified as totemistic, were, after all, only popular superstitions. But I went behind this stage. I inquired as to the origin of the superstitions, and because they classified under a plan which was drawn up from the facts of savage totemism, I drew conclusions from the similarity of classification as to the similarity of origin, and my subsequent studies on the same subject have not altered my opinion.

Well, then, if every fragment of belief, custom, or tradition that is not academic in origin has an origin in man's observation of fact, we have before us the doctrine that the primitive thought of man does not change radically, but slowly develops from one stage to another. And it is this doctrine that alone justifies the comparison of beliefs and customs in widely separated areas. In any given society, all that is in the process of development is culture; all that has ceased to develop, and remains crystallized, is folk-lore. We may compare, therefore, the culture of one people with the folk-lore of another, because both are upon the same level of development; or we may