Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/116

 108 it differs from them all. The people know astronomy and the astronomer knows astronomy; but the latter has built up, upon the first notions of the former, which served him as a foundation, a much richer and more ample knowledge—a superior knowledge, which, in its turn, and very slowly, extends downwards and becomes general in the lower social strata, in which it remains as a deposit of a certain definite degree of civilisation, whilst science goes on advancing in its road, discovering new horizons, and continually laying aside those ideas which, scientific in their day, or perhaps, to speak more exactly, peculiar to the educated classes, are now relegated to the vulgar; whence we deduce that many proverbs which are heard now only in the mouths of old women, or of the uneducated, were in their time considered as sentences of the learned, to such an extent that it would not be difficult by a conscientious study of proverbial lore to distinguish the contingent of ideas which philosophical, moral, and religious doctrines—as influential as the Aristotelian, the Platonic, and the Christian—have successively furnished to our proverbs. To make use of a somewhat humorous illustration, we might say that the man of science deals with the people as epicures do with certain shell-fish, that is, he eats the animal and throws aside the shell; and this, and nothing more, are the dogmas which are consigned to proverbs when they serve no longer for use in the practical facts of life.

Having made it plain then that the subject-matter of folk-lore contains in a certain measure that of all the other sciences, and that the degree of knowledge which it supposes is inferior to their systematised knowledge, we go on now to indicate the conception which we have formed of the subject-matter, people, since only by analysing the component parts of the word folk-lore can we formulate a definition of this science.

The word folk, corresponding to the term volk in German, the Latin vulgus, Italian volgo, Spanish vulgo, according to the authorised opinion of the Italian philologist Stanislas Prato, signifies, according to our judgment, not the whole of humanity nor an abstract personality, but a portion of the human race, a body of men, who, though differing from each other as little as possible, possess a series of common signs and are really anonymous, in contradistinction from