Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/298

290 passion, without prejudice—the material reaches us unrefracted; unaffected by what the astronomer calls "personal equation."

In the publicity which its records secure to such results is the service of this Society best rendered. Now and again, working in the spirit of Old Mortality, it may recover some mildewed MS. or forgotten tome in which exist materials of priceless worth gathered from districts whence now the screech of the locomotive-whistle has driven the fairies; materials by the recovery of which some missing pages in the history of humanity's slow and toilsome upward career are replaced. Thus regained and classified in order, customs, phrases, "wise saws," fireside tales, and nursery songs familiar to those of us whose childhood was passed in the country, come back with added and newer meanings, and that which terrified or amused our childhood becomes the serious study and fruitful instructor of our manhood in tracing the zigzag course of human progress. That for which it was most prized in the days of our fathers is now of no account; that within it which they passed by we secure as of permanent worth.

But whilst the Folk-Lore Society must be primarily a publishing society, it does not exceed its province in now and then pausing in front of the mass of material already gathered and asking what it all means. Can that material be dealt with as the geologist, who, detaching a fragment here and there from various strata, learns the story of their structure and the conditions which placed them in their several layers? or who, dealing with the rocks en masse, classifies the several formations, determines their order and succession, and their leading characteristics? I think this twofold method is applicable to the material of folk-lore; it is ample enough for classification upon some broad general principles, whilst its component parts are clear enough in their structure to show what crude philosophy, science, and theology are crystallised or fossilised within them.

To continue the parallel: as with the crust of the earth so with folk-lore. The rocks, infinitely varied as they are, are compounded of but few elementary substances; the mass of folk-tales is reducible in essential details to a few incidents. They are what the chemist terms allotropic, as in the case of the diamond and charcoal, built up of the same substances, but in such varying molecular arrangement that