Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/217

 THE SCIENCE OF FOLK-LORE. 209

spread are the ideas which form the basis and which show the meaning of Indian nursery rites and old wives' cures," and he goes on to say : " These practices and beliefs are found close under the surface in all nations, however high their religion and refined their culture. They have the great interest and value of being survivals of often the only traces of forefathers as rude and hard pressed as the wildest tribes now on earth. Like present mid tribes^ the ancestors of all nations had practices coarse and strange, hut always sensihUj based on the experience of what had stood them in greatest stead in their ceaseless and uphill fight with disease and death." These are weighty words, and show the every-day practical value of such researches as the writer's. I have no hesitation in saying that to us Englishmen such studies are not only practical, but they are in some respects of the first importance. The practices and beliefs included under the general head of Folk-lore make up the daily life of the natives of our great dependency, control their feelings, and underlie many of their actions. We foreigners cannot hope to understand them rightly unless we deeply study them, and it must be remembered that close acquaintance and a right understanding begets sympathy, and sympathy begets good government; and who is there to say that a scientific study which promotes this, and, indeed, to some extent renders it possible, is not a practical one ?

In running over the various efforts already made by this Society to erect the study of Folk-lore into a Science, it may seem to some that the above remarks have come rather late in the day ; but I have been emboldened to make them, as those members, who have a practical experience of the study, have, as I gather, been directly invited to communicate their individual notions. Soon after its formation the Folk-Lore Society began to take a scientific view of its subject, though it hardly seems to have been founded with that idea. There are no signs of any but a literary and antiquarian interest in Folk- lore in Mr. Thoms's preface to the first volume of the Record ; but Mr. Ralston in the same volume draws attention to a system of classi- fication and nomenclature of folk-tales, and the Council commenced on the bibliography of Folk-lore and the indexing of Folk-lore books.

Vol. 4. — Part 3. v