September 29, 1898] 



NATURE 



529 



two there is a great gulf fixed. Somewhere that gulf must be 

 bridged over. Prof. Boyd Dawkins says that the bridge is not 

 to be found in the caverns of the South of France. It is 

 difficult to meet his argument that the presence of grains of 

 batley and stones of the cultivated plum at Mas d'Azil are 

 evidences of neolithic civilisation. His objections to other dis- 

 coveries are not so strong as this, but are strong enough to make 

 us pause. The tall, long-headed, people whose remains were 

 found at Cro-Magnon, he holds to be early neolithic and not 

 palaeolithic, to stan<l on the near side and not on the far side of 

 the great gulf. 



These considerations lend importance to the discoveries which 

 have been laid before this Association at previous meetings by 

 Mr. Seton-Kerr, and which have also been commented upon by 

 Prof. Flinders Petrie and Sir John Evans. If we are compelled 

 to admit a breach of continuity in Europe, is it in Africa that we 

 shall find the missing links? That is another of the great 

 problems yet unsolved. The evidence we want relates to events 

 which took place at so great a distance of time that we may well 

 wait patiently for it, assured that somewhere or other these 

 missing links in the chain of continuity must have existed and 

 probably are still to be found. 



The next stage, which comprises the interval between the 

 neolithic and the historic periods, was so ably dealt with by Mr. 

 Arthur J. Evans in his address to this Section at the Liverpool 

 meeting, that it does not call for any observations from me. 

 Two Committees appointed by the Association in connection 

 with this Section touch upon this interval — the Committee for 

 investigating the lake dwellings at Glastonbury, and the Com- 

 mittee for co-operating with the explorers of Silchester in their 

 well-conducted and fruitful investigation of the influence of 

 Roman civiHsation on a poor provincial population. I pass on 

 to consider the very great progress that has been made of Ute years 

 in some of the branches of anthropology other than physical and 

 prehistoric, and especially in that of folk-lore. I do this the 

 more readily because I do not recollect that folk-lore has ever 

 before been prominently referred to in an address to this Section. 

 It is beginning to assert itself here, and will in time acquire >the 

 conspicuous position to which it is becoming entitled, for the 

 British Association is sensitive to every scientific movement, 

 and responds readily to the demands of a novel investigation. 

 Already, for three or four years, a day has been given at our 

 meetings to folk-lore papers ; and at the Liverpool meeting an 

 exceeding philosophic, and at the same time practical, paper 

 was read by Mr. Gomme, and is printed in extenso in the 

 Proceedings as an Appendix to the Report of the Ethnographic 

 Survey Committee. The term " folk-lore " itself is not without 

 a certain charm. It is refreshing to find a science described by 

 two English syllables instead of by some compound Greek word. 

 The late Mr. W. J. Thoms had a happy inspiration when he 

 invented the name. It is just twenty years since the Folk-lore 

 Society was established under his direction. It has accumulated 

 a vast amount of material, and published a considerable 

 literature ; it is now rightly passing from the stage of collection 

 to that of systematisation, and the works of Mr. J. G. Frazer, 

 Mr. E. Sidney Hartland, and others, are pointing the way 

 towards researches of the most absorbing interest and the 

 greatest practical importance. 



A generalisation for which we are fast accumulating material 

 in folk-lore is that of the tendency of mankind to develop the 

 like fancies and ideas at the like stage of intellectual infancy. 

 This is akin to the generalisation that the stages of the life of 

 an individual man present a marked analogy to the correspond- 

 ing stages in the history of mankind at large ; and to the 

 generalisation that existing savage races present in their 

 intellectual development a marked analogy to the condition of 

 the earlier races of mankind. The fancies and ideas of the 

 child resemble closely the fancies and ideas of the savage, and 

 the fancies and ideas of primitive man. 



An extensive study of children's games, which had been 

 entered into and pursued by Mrs. Gomme, has been rewarded 

 by the discovery of many facts bearing upon these views. A 

 great number of these games consist of dramatic representations 

 of marriage by capture and marriage by purchase — the idea of 

 exogamy is distinctly embodied in them. You will see a body 

 of children separate themselves into two hostile tribes, establish 

 a boundary line between them, demand the one from the other 

 a selected maiden, and then engage in conflict to determine 

 whether the aggressors can carry her across the boundary or the 

 defenders retain her within it. 



NO. 1509, VOL. 58] 



There can be little doubt that these games go back to a high 

 antiquity, and there is much probability that they are founded 

 upon customs actually existing, or just passing away at the time 

 they were first played. Games of this kind pass down with 

 little change from age to age. Each successive generation of 

 childhood is short : the child who this year is a novice in a 

 game becomes next year a proficient, and the year after an 

 expert, capable of teaching others, and proud of the ability to 

 do so. Even the adult recollects the games of childhood and 

 watches over the purity of the tradition. The child is ever a 

 strong conservative. 



Upon the same principle, next to children's games, children's 

 stories claim our attention. Miss Roalfe Cox has collected, 

 abstracted, and tabulated not fewer than 345 variants of 

 Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap o' Rushes. These come from all 

 four quarters of the globe, and some of them are recorded as 

 early as the middle of the sixteenth century. These elaborate 

 stories are still being handed down from generation to genera- 

 tion of children, as they have been for countless generations in 

 the past. Full of detail as they are, they may be reduced to a 

 few primitive ideas. If we view them in their wealth of detail, 

 we shall deem it impossible that they could have been dissem- 

 inated over the world as they are otherwise than by actual 

 contact of the several peoples with each other. If we view 

 them in their simplicity of idea, we shall be more disposed to 

 think that the mind of man naturally produces the same result 

 in the like circumstances, and that it is not necessary to 

 postulate any communication between the peoples to account 

 for the identity. It does not surprise us that the same com- 

 plicated physical operations should be performed by far distant 

 peoples without any communication with each other : why 

 should it be more surprising that mental operations, not nearly 

 so complex, should be produced in the same order by different 

 peoples without any such communication ? Where communica- 

 tion is proved or probable, it may be accepted as a sufficient 

 explanation ; where it is not provable, there is no need that we 

 should assume its existence. 



The simple ideas which are traceable in so many places and 

 so far back are largely in relation with that branch of mythology 

 which personifies the operations of nature. Far be it from me 

 to attempt to define the particular phase of it which is embodied 

 in the figure of Cinderella as she sits among the ashes by the 

 hearth, or to join in the chase after the solar myth in popular 

 tradition. The form of legend which represents some of the 

 forces of nature under the image of a real or fictitious hero 

 capable of working wonders appears to be widely distributed. 

 Of such, I take it, are the traditions relating to Glooscap, which 

 the late Dr. S. T. Rand collected in the course of his forty 

 years' labours as a missionary among the Micmac Indians of 

 Nova Scotia, where, Mr. Webster says, Glooscap formerly 

 resided. The Indians suppose that he is still in existence, 

 although they do not know exactly where. He looked and 

 lived like other men ; ate, drank, smoked, slept and danced 

 along with them ; but never died, never was sick, never grew 

 old. Cape Blomidon was his home, the Basin of Minas his 

 beaver-pond. He had everything on a large scale. At Cape 

 Split he cut open the beaver dam, as the Indian name of the 

 cape implies, and to this we owe it that ships can pass there. 

 Spencer's Island was his kettle. His dogs, when he went away, 

 were transformed into two rocks close by. When he returns he 

 will restore them to life. He could do anything and everything. 

 The elements were entirely under his control. You do not often 

 meet with a mischievous exercise of his power. It is a curious 

 part of the tradition, possibly a late addition to it, that it was 

 the encroachments and treachery of the whites which drove him 

 away. 



The early inhabitants of the island of Tahiti appear to have 

 had a whole pantheon of gods and heroes representing the 

 various operations of nature. Even the Papuans have a legend 

 in which the morning star is personified acting as a thief. But 

 it is needless to multiply instances. Lord Bacon — who says 

 " The earliest antiquity lies buried in silence and oblivion. . . . 

 This silence was succeeded by poetical fables, and these at length 

 by the writings we now enjoy ; so that the concealed and secret 

 learning of the ancients seems separated from the history and 

 knowledge of the following ages by a veil or partition wall of 

 fables interposing between the things that are lost and those 

 that remain" — has shown in his *' Wisdom of the Ancients" 

 that classical ntythology was in truth a vast system of nature- 

 worship, and in so doing has done more than even he knew, 



