Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/379

Rh certainly do not meet with ready acceptance in a community which is keenly interested in its own history and eager to keep pure and unadulterated the traditions handed down by their forefathers; for among savages there is as great a zeal for historical truth as anywhere. But it is possible that when the interest in traditions dies out with the break down of old customs, forgeries gain readier credence; that is what seems to be happening at the present day in Fiji; the young generation schooled with a bastard European schooling are like houses swept clean of old and venerable superstitions, and left open to new and unwholesome impostures.

There are interesting lines of research which I can recommend to those who dwell among peoples to whom myths are still as real as the Norman Conquest is to us.

Much, indeed, remains to be done in this sphere. Language has had its share of attention, and so has art; it is time now that those feelings and ideas which, never embodied in metal or stone, live in the mind alone, should be acknowledged as realities as real as those that can be touched and capable of being treated with the same rigour as anything that falls under our senses.