Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/67

Rh in the sub-title of his book, "an exact between  and " may be commended to such as have not read their works. Enough has been said, I hope, to indicate what strata of human history await that fuller explanation which lies within the province of folklore. Until our time that work has extended but a little way down. The old labourers thought that they were near primary formations when they struck on classical or so-called pagan ideas. In truth, they had probed but a comparatively recent layer, since far beneath lay the unsuspected prehistoric deposits of barbaric ideas which are coincident with, and composed of, man's earliest speculations about himself and his surroundings.

But, like the divisions of the strata of the globe itself, ours are artificial. There is no real detachment.

The rite of baptism cannot be satisfactorily explained without reference to barbaric lustrations and water-worship generally; nor that of the eucharist without reference to sacrificial feasts in honour of the gods; feasts at which they were held to be both the eaters and the eaten. In the gestures denoting sacerdotal benediction we have probably an old form of averting the evil eye; in the act of breathing, the survival of belief in transference of spiritual qualities, the soul being, as language evidences, well-nigh universally identified with breath. The modern spiritualist who describes apparitions as having the "consistency of cigar-smoke," is one with the Congo negroes who leave the house of the dead unswept for a time lest the dust should injure the delicate substance of the ghost; and the inhaling of the last