ON STONK FOLK-LORE. 201 



represents a wide and often a highly complex generalization, 

 helpful to thinkers as keeping a variety of subjects together, 

 each of which, nevertheless, lays claims to separate and 

 independent discussion. For example, archaic anthropology 

 embraces among its several leading subjects one of which 

 little can be made, if the relations of each to all are not 

 recognised. I refer to "Folk-Lore," wJiich, historically, is 

 but of yesterday. When first used, the term was limited to the 

 consideration of the traditional superstitions, and the social 

 or domestic customs, met with chiefly among the illiterate 

 scattered over rural districts, or prevalent in country towns 

 far from centres of thought, action, and enterprise. And 

 this was before the " schoolmaster was abroad," and the 

 policeman present in these out-of-the-way localities. When 

 even the feeble flickering of the oil lamp did not break the 

 darkness, or make it visible in well-peopled places. Thus 

 there was no chance of the weird, clever ghost being caught, 

 or the would-be witch burned, or the man who met hhnself 

 face to face when strolling at twilight in his own garden, 

 being treated as a lunatic. 



The folk-lore sphere is now greatly widened. Though so 

 recently as 1846 it was no more than a subordinate branch 

 of archeeology, it now claims for itself a place and impor- 

 tance equal to that usually assigned to anthropology and 

 archasology themselves. "It has now been extended to 

 include the whole vast background of popular thought, 

 feeling, and usage, out of which, and in contrast to which, 

 have been developed all the individual products of human 

 activity which go to make up what is called history. As 

 the meaning of folk-lore has expanded, so the relations of 

 the science that studies its manifestations have extended, 

 till it has been correlated with all the groups of organized 

 studies that deal with the past of Man. Folk-lore, in its 

 investigations into popular belief, gives aid to, and receives 

 help from the cognate studies of Mythology and Comparative 

 Rehgion. Folk-lore, in investigating popular usages, often 

 flnds traces of past institutions which are being studied by 

 the new and vigorous science of Institutional Archaeology. 

 And in studying the literature of the people — the ballad, the 

 fairy-tale, the proverb, the chap book — folk-lore has often 

 to resort for elucidation to the products of individual artistic 

 creation which go to form literature properly so called, 

 especially in that mediseval phase of it that is known as 

 romance. And, finally, as it has been found by practice 



