490 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE IN THE CENTURY. 



templated as historical. The key to the fairy idea 

 is that there once was a real race of people to whom 

 all kinds of attributes, possible and impossible, have 

 been given in the course of uncounted centuries of 

 story-telling by races endowed with a lively imagi- 

 nation." * From British folk-lore about fairies, 

 Prof. Rhys has constructed a picture of an ancient 

 race in Britain, " small, swarthy mound-dwellers, of 

 an unwarlike disposition, much given to magic and 

 wizardry, and living underground: its attributes 

 have been exaggerated or otherwise distorted in the 

 evolution of the Little People of our fairy tales." f 



With the help of folk-lore and linguistics it may 

 thus became possible to trace a probable succession of 

 British peoples the Little People, the taller Pict8 

 who enslaved them, the Celts, and so on. 



Though we must not make a dogma of it, there 

 seems much to be said for the generalisation that 

 similar interpretations and similar modes of fanciful 

 expression crop up at similar stages in the intellec- 

 tual evolution of different races. The wide dissemi- 

 nation of many old stories, like that of Cinderella, 

 suggests this. " If we view them in their wealth 

 of detail, we shall deem it impossible that they 

 could have been disseminated 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 dis- 

 posed to think that the mind of man naturally pro- 

 duces the same result in the like circumstances, and 

 that it is not necessary to postulate any communica- 



* Prof. John Rhys, Address to Anthropological Section, 

 Rep. Brit. Ass. for 1900, p. 885. 



f Op. cit., p. 896. 



