TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 885 



Now all that, however amusing it may have heen, has been changed, and what 

 now happens is somewhat as follows : AB makes an experiment or propounds 

 what he calls a working hypothesis ; but no sooner has AB done so than CD, who 

 is engaged in the same sort of research, proceeds to improve on AB. This, 

 instead of impelling AB to rush after CD with all kinds of epithets, and insinuating 

 that his character is deficient in all the ordinary virtues of a man and a brother, 

 only makes him go to work again and see whether he cannot improve on CD's 

 results ; and most likely he succeeds, for one discovery leads to another. So we 

 have the spectacle not infrequently of a man illustrating the truth of the poet's 

 belief, 



• That men may rise on stepping-stones 

 Of their dead selves to higher things.' 



It is a severe discipline in which all display of feeling is considered bad form. Of 

 course every now and then a spirit of the ruder kind discards the rules of the game 

 and attracts attention by having public fits of bad temper ; but generally speaking 

 the rivalry goes on quietly enough to the verge of monotony, with the net result 

 that the stock of knowledge is increased. I may be told, however, that while 

 this kind of exercise may be agreeable to the ass who writes, it is not conducive 

 to the safety of the publisher's chickens. To that it might suffice to answer that 

 the publisher is usually one who is well able to take good care of his chickens ; 

 hut, seriously, what it would probably mean is, that in the matter of the more pro- 

 gressive branches of study, smaller editions of the books dealing with them would be 

 required, but a more frequent issue of improved editions of them or else new books 

 altogether, a state of things to which the publisher would probably find ways of 

 adapting himself without loss of profit. And after all, the interests of know- 

 ledge must be reckoned uppermost. It is needless to say that I have in view only a 

 class of books which literary men proper do not admit to be literature at all ; and 

 the book trade has one of its mainstays, beyond all doubt, in books of pure litera- 

 ture, which are like the angels that neither marry nor give in marriage : they go on 

 for ever in their serene singleness of purpose to charm and chasten the reader's 

 mind. 



My predecessor last year alluded to an Oxford don said to have given it as his 

 conviction, that anthropology rests on a foundation of romance. I have no notion 

 who that Oxford don may have been, but I am well aware that Oxford dons have 

 sometimes a knack of using very striking language. In this case, however, I 

 should be inclined to share to a certain extent that Oxford don's regard for 

 romance, holding as I do that the facta of history are not the only facts deserving 

 of careful study by the anthropologist. There are also the facts of fiction, and to 

 some of those I would now call your attention. Recently, in putting together 

 a volume on AVelsh folklore, I had to try to classify and analyse in my mind the 

 stories which have been current in Wales about the fairies. Now the mass of 

 folklore about the fairies is of various origins. Thus with them have been more or 

 less inseparably confounded certain divinities or demons, especially various kinds 

 of beings associated with the rivers and lakes of the country. They are creations 

 introduced from the workshop of the imagination ; then there is the dead ancestor, 

 who also seems to have contributed his share to the sum total of our notions about 

 the Little People. In far the greater number of cases, however, we seem to have 

 something historical, or, at any rate, something which may be contemplated 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 

 imagination. 



When the mortal midwife has been fetched to attend on a fairy mother in a 

 fairy palace, she is handed an ointment which she is to apply to the fairy baby's 

 eyes, at the same time that she is gravely warned not to touch her own eyes with 

 it. Of course any one can foresee that when she is engaged in applying the 

 ointment to the young fairy's eyes one of her own eyes is certain to itch and have 

 the benefit of the forbidden salve. When this happens the midwife has two very 



