Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/20

 12 is a custom or superstition valuable: for both have descended by the acts or beliefs of the people from one generation to another. There is thus the underlying factor of a common origin which enables us to speak of all three as one study. But there is something further and of much more importance than the common attribute of being traditional, which connects folk-tales, customs and superstitions under one common band, and which declares that folk-lore cannot properly be limited to any one of these three groups, and that attempted scientific conclusions cannot be drawn from one without any reference to the others. And this is the fact that each of these three classes dovetail into each other; or, in other words, that a feature represented, say in a folk-tale, is represented also in certain customs or certain superstitions.

Mr. Lang has explained some well-known stories by showing how the incidents in them relate to some custom of barbaric ages; and his contention is strongly supported by the most important evidence which Captain Temple in his volume of Wide-Awake Stories brings forward as to the incidents of folk-tales being the really important factor, and their actual setting being merely the accidental form in which every narrator chooses to vary his stock of well-known and often-repeated facts. Captain Temple's observations are so important that I would again urge that a standard index of folk-tale incidents should be undertaken by the Society.

We can now come to our final question, namely, whether all the subjects grouped together under the title of folk-lore are of any scientific use. The answer to this is, I venture to think, to be found in the fact that from folk-lore can be ascertained, without the help of any other science or study, certain definite facts in man's history which cannot be ascertained from any other source. Taking English national life, for instance, we know very little of prehistoric times or early Anglo-Saxon times without the aid of folk-lore; and I may perhaps venture to instance my own book on Folk-Lore Relics of Early Village Life to illustrate what definite results folk-lore can produce when applied to unlock some of the problems lost to pure history. Again, Mr. Black has produced from folk-lore some most important results in the early history of man upon the subject of folk-medicine, and this again