Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/204

196 certain natural laws which I will endeavour to shadow forth presently. Critical acumen and that accurate explanation of facts, which is based on systematic study and observation, and which we now call scientific, has come very slowly to mankind:—to a great extent indeed in our days. It has arrived at its present condition point by point, as has everything else in the world; and the cruder the mind of the varieties of man all the world over, now and in times past, and the further from the scientific state, the rougher the explanation and the wilder the guesses at truth. It must be remembered that the scientific explanation of a phenomenon involves critical observation, which is itself the outcome of a long continued education; the power of logical deduction, which may be reckoned as being mainly absent from the average popular mind; and the faculty for extended application, which is to a great extent the distinguishing mark of a trained intellect. What chance then has the untutored savage, or indeed the uncultivated member of a civilized race, of arriving at a right conclusion about anything that comes within his ken? As a matter of fact, the stages of observation, collection and arrangement of facts, and argument thereon, are impossible to such an individual, and in common parlance he invariably jumps to his conclusions: not because he is too idle to do otherwise, but because he cannot help himself. Hence comes Folk-lore, not exactly the Folk-lore we now study,—for this is a growth with a long history of its own,—but Folk-lore as the popular explanation of phenomena.

Where the effect does not immediately follow the cause, or where the connection between cause and effect is not at once apparent, the popular mind cannot hit off the true explanation of the effect, except by accident, and hence it is that Folk-lore is to a great extent a permanent record, as well as a perpetuation, of popular errors. It must always be so. To take altogether modern phenomena. Will a savage or an Asiatic peasant, for instance, ever give the true reason for the movement of the trains on the railway that is being made through his lands? The motor will be a devil that sits in the engine, or the engine itself a panting spirit controlled by the driver; anything rather than the reality. So will the telegraph wires be a means of carrying letters, or be endowed with the power of communicating the