TKANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 1007 



real a part of man's organisation as any physical member or mental fivcultj. AVe 

 shall have no reason to think that it is an exception to any general law of progress 

 and of continuity which is found to prevail in any other part of man's nature. 



The same inference may be drawn from many other considerations. Take, for 

 instance, the belief in witchcraft, which is so characteristic of uncivilised man that 

 it is hardly necessary to cite examples of it. The llev. Mr. Coillard, a distin- 

 guished missionary of the Evangelical Society of Paris, in a delightful record, 

 which has j iist been published, of his twenty years' labours as a missionary pioneer 

 among the Banyai and Barotzi of the Upper Zambesi, ' on the threshold of Central 

 Africa,' says : ' In the prison of the Barotzi, toiling at earthworks, is a woman — 

 young, bright, and intelligent. She told me her story. A man of remarkably 

 gentle character had married her. The king's sister, Katoka, having got rid of one 

 of her husbands, cast her eyes on this man and took him. He had to forsake his 

 young wife — quite an easy matter. Unfortunately, a little later on, a dead mouse 

 was found in the princess's house. Ihere was a great commotion, and the cry of 

 witchcraft was raised. The bones did not fail to designate the young woman, and 

 she was made a convict. A few years ago she would have been burnt alive. Ah, 

 my friends, paganism is an odious and a cruel thing!' Ah, Mr. Coillard, is it 

 many years ago that she would have been burnt alive or drowned in Christian 

 England or Christian America ? Surely the odiousness and the cruelty are not 

 special to paganism any more than to Christianitj'. Tbe one and the other are due 

 to ignorance and superstition, and these are more hateful in a Matthew Hale or a 

 Patrick Henry than in a Barotzi princess in the proportion that they ought to have 

 been more enlightened and intelligent than she. It is only 122 years since John 

 "Wesley wrote: *I cannot give up to all the Deists in Great Britain the existence 

 of witchcraft ; ' and I believe that to this day the Order of Exorcists is a recog- 

 nised order in the Catholic Church. 



The same line of argument — which, of course, I am only indicating liere — 

 might be pursued, I am persuaded, in numberless otlier directions. Mr. Frazer, in 

 his work on the Golden Bough, has most learnedly applied it to a remnikable 

 group of 'beliefs and observances. Mr. Ilartland has followed up that research 

 with a singularly luminous study of several other groups of ideas in the three 

 volumes of his ' Legend of Perseus.' More recently, Mr, Andrew Lang has sought 

 to show that the idea of a Supreme Being occurs at an earlier stage in the 

 development of savage thought than we had hitherto supposed. Striking as these 

 various collocations of facts and the conclusions drawn from them may appear, I 

 am convinced there is much more for the Folk-lorist to do in the same direction. 



The principle that underlies it all seems to be this : man can destroy nothing, 

 man can create nothing, man cannot of his own mere volition even permanently 

 modify anything. A higher power restrains his operations, and often reverses his 

 work. You think you have exterminated a race : you have put to the sword every 

 male you can find, and you have starved and poisoned all the survivors of tbe 

 community. In the meanwhile, their blood has been mingled with yours, and for 

 ganerations to come your bones and those of your descendants will preserve a 

 record of that lost race. You think jou have exterminated a religion : you have 

 burned to death aU of its teachers you can find, and converted forcibly or by 

 persuasion the rest of the community. But you cannot control men's thoughts, 

 and the old beliefs and habits will spring up again and again, and insensibly 

 modify your own religion, pure as you may suppose it to be. 



Huxley, in his address to the department of Anthropology twenty years ago, 

 said, with the force and candour that were characteristic of him : ' Anthropology 

 has nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of religion — it holds itself absolutely 

 and entirely aloof from such questions — but the natural history of religion, and the 

 origin and the growth of the religions entertained b}' the dift'erent kinds of the 

 human race, are within its proper and legitimate province.' I do not presume to 

 question that as an absolutely accurate definition of the position — it could not 

 be otherwise ; but if there be any here to whom what I have been suggesting is in 

 any sense novel op startling, I should be glad to be allowed to fay one -n ord of 

 reassurance to them. When my friend Mr. Clodd shocked some of the members 



