Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/115

 repeat it. The naturalist who wishes to describe a mammoth does not carry it about with him; the botanist who wishes to describe a lily does not carry it about with him like Mr. Oscar Wilde. Both have technical means of describing these objects of their study and their various parts, by which other naturalists who have never seen mammoths or lilies will be able to understand their constitution. So I hope that one day, instead of having to read the tale of "Lady Featherflight" we may be able to know its contents from the list of its incidents somewhat as follows:—.—Hero prisoner of giant—Bride wager—Tasks (byre-thatching, seed-division, sand-rope)—Answering inanimates—Obstacles to pursuit (forest, lake)—Face in pool—Lovers' union. I am not at all unaware that in rendering the story to such a skeleton its charm has for the time vanished, and I am prepared for some of our President's irony on such a scheme. But when one has to study a couple of dozen of stories of the same general character it is almost indispensable that one should have some such curt method of analysing, so as to be able to run over a large number of stories, picking out the common incidents, and thus arriving, if possible, at the original form in which the story first appeared, and thereby settling the place where the tale was first told.

That seems to me the problem most pressing in the study of the folk-tale just now. When did the story iirst appear, and how was it diffused to the places where it has also been found? Till we know that, it is of little use to discuss the savage ideas in it, for it may not have arisen where there were savages; and, at any rate, it does not follow that those ideas were ever prevalent among the people where the story happens to be found. English children of last century adopted from Perrault the story of Puss in Boots, but they did not therefore believe in speaking animals, or, rather, they were attracted to the story just because it contained these fantastic elements. And in settling the original habitat of a story, I do not see why we should depart from the method which naturalists follow in settling the original habitat of a beast or bird. If Mr. Wallace wants to know which was the original home of the tom-tit, he draws a map of the world, marking where the varieties of tom-