Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/148

110.

Professor A. C. Haddon said, in the course of his studies during the last one or two years he had come to the conclusion that savages never invented, but always copied patterns and designs. In collecting material in a district they would be able to hunt down any pattern or name to its origin (except a zig-zag line which could not be traced), as being originally a representation of some natural object. Therefore, in savage folk-lore, they must in the first place look for some natural original, and only in the second place to fancy. Seeing that they had to deal with a complex matter, he rather reckoned himself on the side of the anthropologists.

Professor Author:John Rhys said that he agreed with everything that Mr. MacRitchie had said. He had just lately published something on the same lines, and there come to the conclusion with regard to fairy tales that the materials certainly come from two sources—perhaps comparatively few from the mere storehouse of imagination, and a good deal more from reflecting the traditions of some ancient race. With regard to dwarfs, the subject was very interesting, and he would like to hear more about it.

did not think that people imagined things without having a certain basis for their ideas, either in their own experience or that of others. Then exaggeration stepped in, just as in the case of a little boy who, having seen a large brown dog, ran home to tell his mother that he had seen a bear. He believed that fairy tales had originated on the same principle, and he therefore thoroughly agreed with the theory propounded in Mr. MacRitchie's paper.

Miss asked whether she might take the liberty of disagreeing with Mr. MacRitchie's paper. She had spent a great many years in the northern provinces of Sutherlandshire, to collect the native tales for a friend. She had found it a futile task to look for any historical basis for the stories she had found; there was a deeper, nobler, and greater foundation for them than anything we could dignify by the name of history. She thought those stories to -be true. There was certainly a true foundation for them. One was a very wonderful story of a great chief, who, getting into a cave, met the devil in the shape of a yellow dog whom he drove into a cask. But the devil escaped by the bung-hole. He sometimes did now. Upon further investigation she had found that these things were attributed to a certain, keen, grasping, clever Highlander of the hard-headed type, not of the sympathetic type. Patriotic man that he was, he had given his allegiance to William of Orange, for whom he raised a regiment, and who conferred