Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/66

 30 in these. Professor Rhys also records the incident of the opening of the magical door as occurring in a fairy tale the scene of which is laid at Ynys Geinon rock, in the Swansea valley. There the fairies have a golden ladder to reach a stone of three tons' weight lying upon the mouth of the pit that gives them access from their cave to the upper air. "They have a little word; and it suffices if the foremost on the ladder merely utters that word, for the stone to rise of itself, while there is another word which it suffices the hindmost in going down to utter so that the stone shuts behind them." But what those words are is a secret known only to the fairies.

Upon the whole, I think it probable that the Oriental and Sicilian versions have been derived (the latter through the former) from the German, but how or when I cannot pretend to say; though I am by no means sure that, underlying a version introduced from the East, there may not be in Sicily a native tale having an analogous plot. On the other hand, the Chinese, the Samoan, the Welsh, and the Zulu stories do not stand in any such relation to the German story, or to one another. They all equally point back to an archaic superstition found yet in full force in China, Polynesia, and South Africa, and of which traces, and more than traces, linger in Germany, Sicily, Wales, and other European countries. To seek their origin, therefore, in a single centre is a problem of well-nigh the same character and conditions as when we search for the cradle of the human race.

In considering the question of the dissemination of folk-tales, a folk-tale ought not to be treated as if it were something apart from all other species of folk-lore. Divide the subject-matter of our science how we will, to study it profitably we must study its various sections side by side, remembering that they are all bound by the same general laws, their existence is dependent on similar conditions, and their relations with one another are often as closely interwoven as any of those which unite order to order of organised beings in the physical world. All kinds of traditions are transmissible from one person, or one set of persons, to another: a truism, this, asserted by the very name of Tradition. Tradition is a delivering, and a tradition is that which is delivered.