Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/78

 54 standpoint, one salient result stands forth with the utmost distinction—the substantial identity of the folklore of rude stone monuments throughout Central and Western Europe. The self-same stories are told, the self-same practices obtain in Ireland and in Spain, in Southern France and in Northern Germany. Now this identity can, in my opinion, only be explained by reference to an identical folk-psychology throughout the district. All classes at one time shared the same beliefs respecting man's relation to his fellow-men and the outside world of nature, shared, too, the practices in which these beliefs found expression. Throughout Europe the cultivated classes, under the influence of Christianity and of antique civilisation, have almost wholly abandoned the practices, and only retain the beliefs and superstition; to the peasant classes, on the other hand, the beliefs are still, largely, a potent reality, the practices are still, largely, a necessary factor m the perpetual combat which man has to wage with his fellows and with the hostile or indifferent forces of nature. The psychological root of the creed is identical, hence the story and the rite in which that creed is embodied are identical. And if kinship of aetiological myth among different peoples be held to imply necessary borrowing on one side or the other, so too the kinship of rite or custom should, logically, convey the same implication. Let the reader of the work under review carefully remark the amazing similarity of the ideas which cling around dolmen and menhir in three such far separated districts as Connaught, the Western Pyrenees, and North Central Germany, and say if the borrowing theory, the validity of which would be triumphantly proclaimed in the case of equal similarity of stories, can possibly be held a sufficient cause?

Before passing from what may be called the evidential value of Mr. Borlase's work, a word must be said concerning the illustrations. These are largely, both sketches and plans, due to the author himself, and where this is not the case are the work of the best Irish antiquaries, or are facsimilied from earlier drawings, many of the utmost rarity. No such mass of figured representation of these monuments has ever been brought together in one work, and in this respect the author's labours may be taken as final, to be supplemented slightly, if at all, by later investigators.

I do not propose to discuss Mr. Borlase's views respecting the nature, origin, date, and lines of distribution of these monuments