October 5, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



503 



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 dis- 

 play 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 exer- 

 cise may be agreeable to the ass who writes, 

 it is not conducive to the safety of the pub- 

 lisher's chickens. To that it might sufi&ce 

 to answer that the publisher is usually one 

 who is well able to take good care of his 

 chickens ; but, seriously, what it would 

 probably mean is, that in the matter of- the 

 more progressive branches of study, smaller 

 editions of the books dealing with them 

 would be required, but a more irequent 

 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 any loss 

 of profits. And after all, the interests of 

 knowledge 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 main stays, 

 no doubt, in books of pure literature, which 

 are like the angels that neither marry nor 

 give in marriage — they go on forever 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 facts 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. Eecently, in putting 

 together a volume on Welsh folklore, I had 

 to try to classify and analyze 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 di- 

 vinities or demons, especially various kinds 

 of beings associated with the rivers and 

 lakes of the country. They are creations 

 introduced from the worship of the imagi- 

 nation ; then there is the dead ancestor, 

 who also seems to have contributed hia 

 share to the sum total of our notions about 

 the Little People. In far the greater num- 

 ber of cases, however, we seem to have 

 something historical, or, at any rate, some- 

 thing which may be contemplated as his- 

 torical. 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 could foresee that when 

 she is engaged in applying the ointment to 

 the young fairy's eyes one of her own eyes 



