Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/50

 40 and Eglinton, and other beguilers, believe in Mrs. Piper," and adds that "it really looks as if 'psychical research' does somehow damage and pervert the logical faculty of scientific minds." Surely the moral of the whole business is that all investigations into phenomena which may be regarded as abnormal should proceed on rigid scientific lines and in broad daylight. When the Society for Psychical Research adopts that method, it will prove itself an effective ally of the Folk-Lore Society.

I now gladly dismiss this subject that it may give place to some observations which are designed as supplemental to the main theme of my former address. The object of that, let me remind you, was to show that folklore—which was defined as the psychical side of anthropology—brings its weighty support to that theory of unity and continuity which involves the inclusion of man in the universal order. It is therefore contributory to the theory of Evolution in the widest significance of that term.

On the present, and, for myself, final occasion, I desire to apply this somewhat in detail, travelling along some definite line, which, so it seems to me, it will be more and more the special province of folklore to pursue.

Comparative anatomy has not more completely demonstrated the common descent of man and ape, and the consequent classification of man in the order Primates, than comparative anthropology has demonstrated his advance from the animal stage to civilisation. That work can never be undone. And one momentous effect of it is the disproof of traditional theories about man's paradisaical state, and his fall therefrom. Yet how slow is the perception of so complete a revolution in our ideas has illustration in the following paragraph, which occurs in a recent book on prehistoric archæology.