Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/50

 the process of evolution, which is the mainspring of our system. Another example may be taken from the realm of magic. All over the world savages practise spells, divinations, superstitious rites; they maim images to hurt the person whom the image resembles; they call up the dead; they track the foot-prints of ghosts in ashes; they tie "witch-knots;" they use incantations; they put sharp objects in the dust where a man has trodden that the man may be lamed. Precisely the same usages survive everywhere in the peasant class, and are studied by amateurs of folk-lore. But among the progressive classes of civilisation those practices do not occur at all; or if they do occur, it is by way of revival and recrudescence. On the other hand, the magical ideas are found much elaborated, in the old myths of civilisation, in the sagas of Medea and Circe, of Odin and Loki. Probably it will now be admitted that we have established the existence of the process of evolution on which our theory depends. It is a vera causa, a verifiable working process. If more examples are demanded, they may be found in any ethnological museum. In General Pitt Rivers's anthropological collection, the development may be traced. Given stone, clay, the tube, or blow-pipe, and the throwing-stick, and you advance along the whole line of weapons and projectiles, reaching the boomerang, the bow, the stone-headed arrow, the metal arrow-head, the dagger, the spear, the sword, and, finally, the rifle and bayonet. The force which works in the evolution of manufactured objects works also in the transmutation of custom into law, of belief into tale, and of tale into myth, with constant minute modification, and purification, degradation, and survival. If we have established the character of our theory, as one of a nature acknowledged and accepted by science, we have still to give evidence for our facts. The main purpose of our earlier pages was to show that the