Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/59

 Rh a personal matter of my own, but a matter that the Society has now put its hand to.

Of course there are difficulties; but in a subject of this kind who can imagine that there would not be—indeed, who would wish there should not be—for if all were clear sailing where would be the merit of our own research and work? But I am yet to understand that our difficulties are any greater than our fellow-workers' in other studies. Anthropology has chosen to look askance—I will not say jealously—at us, and the Society organised for its advancement has during the last year, as you have heard from the Annual Report, neglected an opportunity which may never occur again for distinctly advancing the cause of scientific research by amalgamating its forces with our own in the grand cause of the science of man. Well, I do not think anthropologists are at all aware of cases where important stages in their published researches are laid open to serious comment because of the neglect shown to the minuter results of folk-lore research, and it may be well to point out an example or two of this.

Let me first, then, draw attention to one of the fundamental stages of social evolution—the tribal organisation. The tribe has a relationship, first, to a body of people living in close contiguity, and sometimes in actual economical and religious contact with it; and, secondly, to the social organisation of the village community. Both these relationships are vital to the proper determination of the evolution of the tribe itself, and yet nowhere have anthropologists fully discussed them, but, on the contrary, have assumed certain ill-ascertained conditions and have then argued therefrom.

What relationship does the tribe really bear to the non-tribal people which so frequently surround it?

"When one passes", says Sir Alfred Lyall, "from those parts of India which have long been under great centralising governments down into the midland countries which have never been fairly conquered by Moghals,