Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/79

Rh —matters belonging to the archæologist rather than to the folklorist. It is only necessary to say that he may legitimately claim to be the greatest living authority on the subject, and that every opinion he expresses deserves the most respectful consideration. It is otherwise with the historical and ethnological deductions which he draws from his admirably arrayed evidence. Here the outsider is as favourably placed as the author for judging the hypotheses of the latter; nay, more so, for the collector and investigator of a vast series of facts can hardly fail to become dominated by one or two leading conceptions, confirmation of which invariably becomes his main preoccupation. I note, then, what seems to me a common failing on the part of monumental archæologists, the tendency to draw far too sweeping historical and ethnological deductions from evidence which cannot really sustain their weight. When, therefore, Mr. Borlase sketches the dispersion from Central France, before brachycephalic invaders, of a primitive dolichocephalic, short, swarthy race, to Northern Africa on one side and along the coasts of North-western Europe to the Gulf of Finland on the other, carrying with them the practice of burial in artificial caves (the mound-covered dolmen), derived from yet earlier practices of natural cavern dwelling and interment, together with the rites and beliefs which the practice originated, I can but urge the purely hypothetical nature of the theory, and plead that the fact of its being based upon examinations of monuments and skulls in nowise makes it less hypothetical. The evidence upon which the archaeologist relies is in itself, it is true, far more definite than that which the folklorist can adduce, but it is also less pregnant and is dead, whereas our evidence, distorted and corrupted as it may be, has yet retained a spark of life.

In the latter portion of his work Mr. Borlase abandons the consideration of the monuments and essays an interpretation of certain Irish legendary traditions. I believe him to be wholly mistaken, and I am anxious to state somewhat fully the ground of my dissent. His views are founded upon research of the widest description, and are marked by extreme ingenuity; and although they at once excite suspicion by their paradoxical character, it would be unfair to him not to discuss them as seriously as he has elaborated them.

The traditions in question are chiefly those referring to the so-called gabhala, or immigrations into Ireland in pre-Christian times.