“ Folk-lorists who think that we neglect ethnology, that we take mankind to be, essentially, too much of the same pattern everywhere, will also have their say. I do not myself believe that some one centre of ideas and myths, India or Central Asia, can be discovered, do not believe that some one gifted people carried everywhere the seeds of all knowledge, of all institutions, and even the plots of all stories. The germs have been everywhere, I fancy, and everywhere alike, the speciality of Race contributes the final form. ”

“ A long and complicated ceremony is less easily transmitted than a short and simple one. A nickname passes from mouth to mouth more rapidly than a proverb, a proverb more rapidly than a story, a story than a song. In short, the more complex the tradition the greater the difificulty of transmission, and the more it depends on frequent repetition and other circumstances calculated to impress it on the memories of the recipients. ”

“ A painful life it seems to us, or to some of us, in which any old woman or medicine man might blast the crops, cause tempest, inflict ill luck and disease, could turn you into a rabbit or a rook, could cause bogies to haunt your cave, or molest your path, a life in which any stone or stick might possess extra-natural powers, and be the home of a beneficent or malignant spirit. A terrible existence that of our ancestors, and yet, without it where would our poetry be, our Greek legends, even our fairy tales? ”

“ The large number of incidents making up the story or stories are like the pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope. You may shake them as much as you please, constantly producing fresh combinations, but the pieces making them up always remain the same. In a similar way the incidents in fairy tales were constantly shaken, producing almost any form, and, bearing this in mind, the essence of this tale of the young man who wins his bride by doing feats is not far to seek. ”

“ What appears to me the most important view of folk-lore is this: That the first and most natural theme for the tales and traditions of unlettered castes or races is the recital of actual events in their own past, and that therefore no assertion made by tradition ought to be classified as fiction until it is clearly shown that it cannot possibly be grounded on fact. My own impression is that a vast amount of what many people regard as fiction is essentially fact; and, further, that a critical study of many so-called myths will eventually throw a great light upon history. ”

“ Call it Anthropology, call it Folk-lore, the science of Man in his institutions and beliefs is full of lessons and of enjoyment. We stand on a height and look backwards on the movement of the Race, we see the wilderness whence it comes, the few straggling paths, that wander, that converge, that are lost in the oA, or in the bush, or meet to become the road, and the beaten highway, and the railway track. ”

“ We can tell the world that it has in itself and around it the materials of a study at least as interesting as botany or geology. The materials of geology or botany we must seek in fields, and mountains, and road-metal; the materials of Folk-lore, of popular and primeval belief, we can find wherever there are human beings. It is also our part to show the conclusions, as wide as human fate and human fortunes, to which our perusal of the facts may guide us. And thus we may win a few new disciples to Folk-lore, and, I sincerely trust, a few more subscribers to the Folk-lore Society. ”

“ All peoples, for example, have a myth (or memory) of a Deluge, only the Jewish race gives it the final monotheistic form in which we know it best. Many peoples, as the Chinese, have the tale of the Returned Husband and the Faithful Wife, only the Greek race gave it the final shape, in the Odyssey. Many peoples, from the Turks to the Iroquois, have the story of the Dead Wife Restored, only Greece shaped the given matter into the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Many races have carved images, only Greece freed Art, and brought her to perfection. ”

“ I shall not throw the apple of theological discord among the Congress, and shall merely confess that this theory does not, as far as I have gone, seem to me to be justified by facts. Among the very rudest peoples whom I have tried to study, the God is already in existence, as well as the ghosts, already makes for righteousness, and promises future punishment and reward. ”

“ In considering the question of the dissemination of folk-tales, a folk-tale ought not to be treated as if it were something apart from all other species of folk-lore. Divide the subject-matter of our science how we will, to study it profitably we must study its various sections side by side, remembering that they are all bound by the same general laws, their existence is dependent on similar conditions, and their relations with one another are often as closely interwoven as any of those which unite order to order of organised beings in the physical world. ”

“ Stories, we are told, especially some stories, must have been invented once, and once only. It would be too great a draught on our credulity to ask us to believe that a complicated plot, or a long series of incidents, or even a single incident of a very remarkable character, was invented in a dozen different places, however similar may be the working of men's minds. But it may have been handed on from man to man, from tribe to tribe, until it had made the circuit of the world. ”

“ I do not know whether I have succeeded in convincing you of what I started out to prove, that just as there is a "blood covenant", so there is a "saliva covenant", and that both rest upon the same conception. Still less do I know whether, in attributing the extensive use of saliva to a belief in its being the vehicle of life, I have hit the real reason of the curious custom, and answered the question of why men spit; for the ways of primitive man are not our ways, neither are his thoughts our thoughts. ”

“ I have always lived among negroes and among white people familiar with their peculiarities and superstitions. For the first time in my life I reflected how small, comparatively, is the number who do understand our Americanised African population. How could I describe to the man who knows him not the cunning, simple, cruel, kindly, untruthful, suspicious yet credulous, superstitious negro, who sees a ghost or devil in every black stump and swaying bush, yet prowls about two-thirds of the night and sleeps three-fourths of the day. ”

“ To a man educated in our own time and country there is an exceedingly sharp contrast between political power and power over private property. In England no one could be in danger of confusing a tax with a rental; while we have given to individuals a very extensive power of disposing of land, we have entirely separated that power from all territorial dominion. In India, before British rule, the combination of rights of sovereignty with rights over the land and its produce is a very familiar fact. We see it everywhere in the ruler's share of the crop ”

“ What then are we to study in a folk-tale? Well, in the first place the folk-tale itself and for itself. The essential character of folk-tales is best described by the Italian name for them, novelline popolari: they are little novels for children, as the others are for children of a larger growth. And in novels the essential thing is plot, which has been well described as pattern in human action. We must be able to draw out this plot, or pattern, in the folk-tale, and for this purpose analyse it into its elements, which are the incidents of the story. ”

“ As you know, both the genial President of our Congress, and the erudite Chairman of our Section, are inclined to think that this coming together of the same incidents, in the same order, and making the same plot, just chances to be so; if it were, there is nothing more to say, and there is no science of the folk-tale. We others have, at any rate, the fun of guessing where the tale first arose, and the pleasure of inventing hypotheses more or less ingenious as to how the stories spread. Our friendly opponents have to seek in the folk-tale an interest quite other than the folktale had herself. ”

“ The stars, but for the ignorant confusions of our fathers, might be masses of incandescent gas, or whatever they are, but they could not have been named with the names of Ariadne and Cassiopeia, nor could Orion have watched the Bear, nor should we known the rainy Hyades, and the sweet influences of the Pleiads. Ignorance, false analogy, fear, were the origin of that poetry in which we have the happier part of our being. ”

“ We learn that a solitary maiden fell in love with a beautiful tree called Ule, laden with purple flowers. "She steadily looked at it with a feeling of tenderness, thinking to herself how she would love it if it were only a man. She painted herself with the juice of the arnotto fruit to heighten her charms and render herself attractive; she wept and sighed, waited and hoped. Her hope did not disappoint her; her love was powerful, and it produced a miraculous transformation; the tree was changed into a man, and the young maiden was happy. ”

“ How much of this "traditional history" is reliable? How far does the popular memory go back, with precision? That it may be trusted, within certain limits, is undeniable. For example, there may be men yet living in the neighbourhood of Waterloo who remember the great battle of 1815. Moreover, they may remember this or that detail of the fight that has never yet been placed on record. The right of such men to be regarded as actual historians, so long as they retain their faculties, cannot be disputed. What they relate is equally folk-lore and history. ”

“ The law of property when we first perceive traces of it is blended with the law of personal status; the separate enjoyment of property in land is evolved from its joint enjoyment; primitive folk do not discriminate crimes from civil wrongs, or the substantive criminal law from criminal procedure. May not the separation of the ideas of property and sovereignty, fused alike in feudal Europe and in nearly feudalised India, be another illustration of the working of the law of evolution that underlies all these progressive changes? ”

“ The method of Folk-lore, as has been seen, rests on an hypothesis, namely, that all peoples have passed through a mental condition so fanciful, so darkened, so incongruous, so inconsistent with the scientific habit that to the scientific it seems insane. I am often asked, supposing your views are correct, how did mankind come to be so foolish? Was mankind ever insane? one is asked. Certainly not; he had always the germ of the scientific habit, was always eager rerum cognoscere causas, but he was ignorant, indolent, and easily satisfied with a theory. How did he come to believe in ghosts? ”

“ Have I made myself clear as to the power of the "cunjer-stone"? Understand, pray, that nothing is required of him who holds it. Possession is not only nine points of the law, it is all of the law; it is initiation, it is knowledge, it is power. ”

“ Therefore, when we find instances of people spitting to cure disease of any kind, I think we may infer that they are really actuated by the same motive as the Australians or the Orinocco chiefs when they give their blood to their sick tribesmen.
And now we may understand the full significance of the spitting at the Roman lustration ceremony. It does not keep witchcraft away: it only makes the child better able to resist and survive it. Why? Because its weak store of life has been implemented with the strong life of its maturer relatives passed on to it in their saliva. ”

“ But the science has gradually increased its scope, till it has, taken almost all human life for its province. Indeed if any one asks how and where Folk-lore differs from anthropology, I am rather at a loss for a reply. When antiquarians such as our own old Aubrey began to examine rural usages and superstitions, like the maypole and the harvest home, they saw—they could hardly help seeing—that the practices of the folk, of the peasant class everywhere, were remains of Gentilism or heathenism. ”

“ I confess, for my part, that my interest in the science of folk-lore would come to naught unless I believed that the traditions alike of our fathers and of the other nations of the world contained, and might be made to yield up to the diligent enquirer, information of the utmost value concerning the primitive beliefs and practices of mankind, and, behind these, the very structure and development of the human mind. In the process of extracting this information the study of folk-tales must always bear an important part ”

“ A ballad or a song is a more consciously artistic work than a tale. Not only must it develop the plot or the sentiment, but it has to conform to certain rules of metre, and usually to certain rules of rhyme. It thus offers a far greater number of opportunities for comparison than a folk-tale, and must consequently ensure greater certainty in the results arrived at. ”

“ We have positive literary evidence of the transmission from one country to another of the stories embodied in Æsop's Fables and The Seven Wise Masters. But, in the absence of such direct and unmistakeable evidence, is it more reasonable to think that a story has been transmitted from abroad than that it has been evolved from within with the evolution of the culture of which, in the case supposed, it forms an intimate and indistinguishable part? ”

“ It arises less from the scientific interest of the problems to be solved, or of the results of the investigation, than from the beauty, the wildness, the weird enchantment of many of the tales themselves, and from the tender recollections awakened by them in almost every mind of the hours and feelings of childhood, of faces, of voices, and of scenes long since passed away. ”

“ We have to earn and not to snatch result and reward. And the tangle of dead and decaying growths of theory with fungi of fallacy growing rankly upon them which surrounds us on every side, warns us at least not to add to the number and thus to hinder a healthier future harvest. They must be allowed time to form a fertile soil, and light and air must first be freely admitted. But perhaps it may be wise sometimes to think of modern ethnological labours under the image of working a mine of exceeding and multifarious richness and immense depth and range. ”

“ The method of Folk-lore rests on the hypothesis of a vast common stock of usage, opinion, and myth, everywhere developed alike, by the natural operation of early human thought. This stock, or much of it, is everywhere retained by the unprogressive, uneducated class, while the priests and poets and legislators of civilisation select from it, and turn customs into law, magic into ritual, story into epic, popular singing measures into stately metres, and vague floating belief into definite religious doctrine. ”

“ How near this definition surely is to what we see at the exceptional crises of life when the ordinary energies are gathered up into a supreme effort! "Thus", we are assured, "all conspicuous success is a proof that a man has 'Mana'; his influence depends on the impression made on the people's mind that he has it; he becomes a chief by virtue of it. Hence a man's power, though political or social in its character, is his 'Mana'; the word is naturally used in accordance with the native conception of the character of all power and influence as supernatural." ”