Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/68

 60 I am not quite sure whether the evidence is yet complete enough to write "proven" against it; but I am sure that it is sufficient to disturb the equanimity of those who, on the strength of the theory that the agricultural stage of society is necessarily an advance upon the hunting and pastoral stage, draw important conclusions as to the relative barbarism or culture of people who are found in either of these conditions of life. I leave this part of my subject in the hands of the Ethnological Committee, and I shall be greatly surprised if, before its work is done, we do not discover that folk-lore has yet some revelations to make not dreamt of by those who shrink from admitting that there can be any science in the testimony of tradition.

But I do not leave the ethnographical evidence of folklore, for I think in the county collections we have the beginning of most excellent material. Thanks to Mr. Hartland, Lady Camilla Gurdon, and Mr. Clodd, we have now two county collections. They are probably not complete; but, as they stand, they afford a very valuable study in comparative folk-lore. It happens that neither Gloucestershire nor Suffolk has received the attention of a special collector of its folk-lore, and we therefore approach these collections almost in the nature of monographs. The two counties are sufficiently distinct, geographically and philologically, to hope for some results, and I have taken the trouble to draw up some points of comparison, from which I will give one important result.

It is that Suffolk appears to have retained the myth-making stage of thought very strongly, while there is no trace of this in Gloucestershire. Thus the peasant at Martlesham in Suffolk, who believed the pudding-stone conglomerate to be the mother of the pebbles, was either a poet or a myth-maker; and I argue for the latter assumption because of his companions, who believed that land produced the stones; that the primroses left Cockfield village because they caught the plague and died; that the Virgin Mary thistle once supplied the place of a cup when