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An immediate death is now finally secured. Moreover, the incident of the corpse which could not be lifted is at last entirely transformed. The curiously long persistence of the latter incident affords a good illustration of what has already been provisionally referred to as "persistence of the trivial," or of the relatively novel, or meaningless. Sometimes a very unusual and out-of-the-way detail serves as an identification mark in a story, and as such it tends to reappear unchanged in many versions. In this particular case the omission is effected in a common and extremely interesting manner by a blending. Instead of being unable to lift the body, the people are merely baulked in their attempt to get it to the boat before the man dies. The effect of the change is that both the death and the curious final incident are rendered more commonplace, and in that sense familiarised.

The transformation is now complete, and the result is a brief statement which my subjects accepted at once as not calling for any explanation.

Rationalisation proper, in the sense of the definite provision of explicit reasons was constantly illustrated. Words such as "therefore," "for," and "because," were frequently inserted where they had been absent from the original. A particularly interesting type of rationalisation was the tendency of the tales to acquire a moral. This occurred on several occasions, and is well illustrated by a comparison of the original with the final versions of another of the stories used. The story in question came from