Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/113

 right first, before we can constitute the science of physiological chemistry.

I may, perhaps, illustrate my point by an instance from a branch of literary art near allied to the folk-tale. The time may come when the novel will be regarded as being as "childish" as some superior persons of our times consider fairy-tales to be. In those dull days we can imagine a scientific student of the novel studying that delectable work The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, and arguing elaborately that the work was written to illustrate the remarkable properties of hansom cabs. Remarkable they are, and we take them nowadays, perhaps, too much as a matter of course; but the writer of that book equally took them as a matter of course, and only used that means of locomotion in his story, if I may say so, in the ordinary course of business. So, too, the semi-savage author of the tale of Cinderella may have lived in a society where the youngest child succeeded, but he was not thinking of that when he composed his tale. And if we, in studying it, pay most attention to junior right, we are, so to speak, only putting the hansom cab before the horse.

There is, in fact, a fundamental difference between the folk-tale and the other departments of folk-lore which renders the anthropological method less applicable to it than to the others. Rites are performed, customs are kept up, for practical purposes, at least, in the first instance. The reason for these rites or customs are thus founded on some idea of the original performers of the rite or custom. Hence it is allowable to look for some savage idea at the root of seemingly unreasonable practices, and it is in this direction that the anthropological method has achieved its greatest successes. But unless we regard the folk-tale as a species of Tendenz-Roman, they have never been told to avert evil or get good luck from the dispensary of such commodities. Hence, if savage customs or ideas do occur in fairy tales, as indeed they obviously do, these are not the essence of the story in them; and if we study them chiefly or exclusively, we are devoting most attention to the accidentals of the folk-tale.

It is urged, indeed, on behalf of this method, that by this means we get valuable archæological evidence of the past of our race. Thus, if we find the tale of Cinderella in Ireland, we have evidence of the former existence of junior-right in succession to property in that country. Now, quite apart from the difficulty