Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/10

 2 Mr. Theal's volume on Kaffir Folk-Lore commences in the same strain:—"Of late years a great deal of interest has been taken in the folk-lore of uncivilised tribes by those who have made it their business to study mankind," the folk-lore here intended being limited to the tales and popular traditions. And many other books could be mentioned.

Now, of course, if this error of limitation in the proper meaning of folk-lore went no further than the titles of books compiled by collectors of popular tales and traditions, it would be a matter of very small moment indeed. We perhaps have no right to expect the collector, the toiler who goes out into the by-paths and outlands of civilisation and into the homes and villages of savage people, to be exact in the docketing and assortment of his collections. We ought to be only too grateful to him for his materials, without which the scientific student would be powerless, to say one word in dispraise of his productions. But, unfortunately, there is too little discrimination between the functions of the collector of folk-lore and the functions of the student of folk-lore. People take up from the one ideas and notions which were never in his province to distribute, and they engraft these ideas and notions on to the work which is performed by the other. It is in this way that the faults of collectors of stories and traditions in identifying their books with the generic term folk-lore have become the faults of the student.

This state of things finds its last stage in Sir George Cox's Introduction to the Science of Comparative Mythology and Folk-Lore, in which it is not too much to say folk-lore is scarcely represented at all. Sir George Cox, in his Preface, says:—"My purpose in this volume is to give a general view of the vast mass of popular traditions belonging to the Aryan nations of Asia and Europe and of other tribes so far as the conditions of the subject may render necessary." With such a purpose in view there was no necessity to set down his book as in any way an introduction to the study of folk-lore. But the evil does not end here. A few lines further down in his Preface Sir George Cox writes:— "Folk-lore, in short, is perpetually running into mythology; and there are few myths which do not exhibit in some of their features points of likeness to the tales usually classified