Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/121

 Rh sufficient importance to constitute sciences independent of folk-lore. The child and the savage of our day find—not only in the humanity which surrounds them, and is in contact with them, but in the very earth which sustains them—a means of culture, a civilisation, which influences them from their earliest moments. The earth itself is also, as it were, educated and civilised by the influence of man, but this does not mean to say that infants, and even savages, in so far as they are archives of traditions, in their different grades of development, do not contain, just as our aristocratic classes do, archaic and traditional elements. In the classes shut out from all communication with the exterior there is, by their very constitution, a multitude of the elements of folk-lore, that is, of rituals and ceremonies, which, though they have lost the raison d'etre of their existence, and the cause which gave them life, are yet true relics of degrees of culture, superior perchance to the popular culture of their own time, but inferior to the popular culture of the present time.

Folk-lore, and in this I think that I am in complete accord with Mr. Sidney Hartland, includes, in my opinion, two chief branches: demo-psychology, or the science which studies the spirit of the people, and demo-biography, which is not the sum of the biographies of the individuals who compose this said aggregate, but the description of the mode of life of the people taken in the aggregate. For purposes of folk-lore, we do not study how it is that John is married to Jane, or how Tom was buried, but the marriage or funeral ceremonies of the men of the people in a given country.

Having mentioned these two principal branches of folk-lore, susceptible in their turn of infinite sub-divisions, I do not think it necessary to state that they have a mutual influence, from the fact that men think as they live, and live as they think.

Here I should conclude these short observations—which I propose to enlarge when Mr. Gomme publishes his promised work on the theme which occupies us—did I not wish to call the attention of my readers in general, and especially of all European folk-lorists, to the advisability of all making known their opinion on the theme proposed by the Secretary of the Folk-Lore Society, in his note on "FolkLore Terminology." To me it seems evident that if folk-lore—a