Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/56

 20 previously intelligible. Does it assume the possibility of a change of form from human to brute, or to vegetable or mineral, and back again, while retaining consciousness and individual identity? Such a possibility must first of all have its place in the conventions of story-telling accepted by the newfolk into whose midstit is launched. And so I might go through every savage idea formulated by anthropologists. Details might differ: they would be modifiable. But the principal ideas would remain steadfast, because they would be already a part of the mental organisation of the recipients. Where such ideas had been forgotten, or where they were absolutely unknown, it would be impossible to transplant the story. A fortiori, where details and all are adopted, the stage of culture of the transmitting folk and that of the receiving folk must be identical.

If this reasoning be true, it deprives of much of its force an objection to the results arrived at by applying the anthropological method of enquiry to any given tale, on the ground that we do not know that the tale in question is indigenous in the country in which it is found, and therefore cannot assume that the ideas or customs it presents ever were current there. If it be admitted, as I understand it is admitted, by the Disseminationists, that we are right in believing that folk-tales, like all other species of traditions, enshrine relics of archaic thought and archaic practice; if those relics be, as we know they are, usually of the very structure and essence of the tale; and if, further, the tales enshrining those relics would be unintelligible to peoples who were strangers to the modes of thought which had produced them; we may be reasonably sure that all such tales must, even if borrowed, have embodied ideas and contained allusions to practices familiar to the borrowing peoples, or they would not have been received into their traditions. Tales may thus in general be safely used as evidence of archaic thought and custom once, if not still, rife among the folk who relate them.

Take, for example, the stories mentioned by Dr. Boas as current among contiguous tribes of North America. The Dog-rib Indians of the Great Slave Lake relate that the primitive ancestress of their race was a woman who was mated with a dog and bore six pups. She was deserted by her tribe, and went out daily to procure food for her family. On returning she found tracks of children about