ETHNOGRAPHICAL SURVEY OF THE UNITED KINGDOM. 517 



is told of a seal which cast its skin and appeared as a woman. A man of 

 the Isle of Unst possessed himself of the seal-skin and thus captured and 

 married her. She lived with him until one day she recovered the skin, 

 resumed her seal-shape and plunged into the sea, never more to return. 

 In Croatia the damsel is a wolf whose wolf-skin a soldier steals. In the 

 Arabian Nights she is a, jinn wearing the feather-plumage of a bird, appa- 

 rently assumed simply for the purpose of flight. In all these cases the 

 variations are produced by causes easily assigned. 



The specific distinctions of a nation's culture are not necessarily limited 

 to changes of traditions which it may have borrowed from its neighbours 

 or inherited from a common stock. It may conceivably develop traditions 

 peculiar to itself. Tliis is a subject hardly yet investigated by students 

 of folkloi'e. Their labours have hitherto been chiefly conlliied to estab- 

 lishing the identity underlying divergent forms of tradition and explaining 

 the meaning of practices and beliefs by comparison of the folklore of dis- 

 tant races at different stages of evolution. But there are not wanting 

 those who are turning their attention to a province as yet unconquered, 

 and indeed almost undiscovered. Even if they only succeed in esta- 

 blishing a negative, if they show that all traditions supposed to be 

 peculiar have counterparts elsewhere, they will have rendered a signal 

 service to science, and produced incontrovertible testimony of the unity 

 of the human mind and the unintermittent force of the laws which 

 govern it. 



Alike for the purpose of ascertaining the specific distinctions of culture 

 and the influences of neighbouring nations and neighbouring civilisations, 

 an accumulation of facts is the prime requisite. If we have reason to 

 believe in the persistence of tradition, we shall have confidence that relics 

 will be discovered in our midst of the faith and institutions of our remoter 

 ancestors ; and, in accordance as we venerate antiquity or desire to pre- 

 serve what remains of the past, we shall hasten to collect them. Nor can 

 we be too quick in so doing. The blood of our forefathers is a permanent 

 inheritance, which it would take many generations and a large interming- 

 ling of foreigners seriously to dilute, much less to destroy. But tradition 

 is rapidly dying. It is dwindling away before the influences of modern 

 civilisation. Formerly, when the rural districts were isolated, when news 

 travelled slowly and nobody thought of leaving his home save to go to the 

 nearest market, and that not too often, when education did not exist for 

 the peasantry and the landowners had scarcely more than a bowing ac- 

 quaintance with it, the talk by the fireside on winter evenings was of the 

 business of the day — the tilling, the crops, the kine. Or it was the gossip 

 and small scandals interesting to such a community, or reminiscences by 

 the elders of the past. Thence it would easily glide into tales and super- 

 stitions. And we know that these tales and superstitions were, in fact, 

 the staple of conversation among our fathers and generally throughout the 

 West of Europe, to go no further afield, down to a very recent period ; 

 and they still are in many districts. In England, however, railways, 

 newspapers, elementary education, politics, and the industrial movements 

 which have developed during the present century have changed the ancient 

 modes of life ; and the old traditions are fading out of memory. The 

 generation that held them is fast passing away. The younger generation 

 has never cared to learn them ; though, of course, many of the minor 

 superstitions and sayings have still a considerable measure of power, espe- 

 cially in the shape of folk-medicine and prescriptions for luck. "We must 



