Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/112

104 When I read in the pages of the Folk-Lore Journal for September last the modest and generous invitation of Mr. G. L. Gomme addressed to the members of the English Society of which he is the Secretary, to give him their opinion as to the meaning and import of the word Folk-lore, and the terminology of this science, I formed the intention of writing the article which I now publish with great hesitation, thinking that, since I am the only Spaniard a member of that Society, the unmerited honour falls upon me of acting as the mouth -piece of my country in the important scientific discussion which doubtless will follow on the brief notice alluded to on Folk-Lore Terminology, and to which Messrs. Nutt, E. Sidney Hartland, C. Staniland Wake, and Henry B. Wheatley, have already replied in the October and November numbers of the Journal.

The first request, therefore, which I wish to make to my illustrious colleagues, and to as many as read this article, is that they should consider as mine all errors into which I may fall, and all that may be useful in it to Spain alone, if it be my good fortune to suggest anything useful towards the scientific investigation proposed by the Secretary of the English Society, and to which I think the mythographers and folk-lorists of all countries should contribute (or, better, treat together for the purpose of definitively now marking out the limits of this new science), since, because the limits are not yet marked out, it is cultivated by different nations with different tendencies and senses.

Having thus discharged my conscience, I wish, without more preamble, to state at once my agreement with the opinion maintained by Messrs. Gomme and Nutt, that folk-lore and mythology are not, as some assert, one and the same thing. The latter, in my opinion, can only be considered, at the most, either as a branch of folk-lore, or as one of the special aims of this science.

Mythology treats of myths or fictions, of elements mainly imaginary or fantastic, and these elements cannot be considered in any other light than as special products of a cerebral or psychological function, that is, as a chapter in demo-psychology, although these products peculiar for the most part to one stage of civilisation, may still subsist as long as the human intellect has not passed beyond the