as evidence of the ideas and the circumstances of those who tell it, caring nothing at all whether it originated among them or not. Some distinction may perhaps be needful in the use of tales believed to be true, and of tales told merely for pleasure. But even the latter, told among an ignorant folk, though not actually credited as statements of fact, must be exponents of ideas and of manners which have had currency, if not among themselves, at least among their forefathers in a not very remote past,[1] the remembrance of which has not yet faded from the general memory, or the stories would have become unintelligible and been forgotten.
Having thus tried to show that the problem of dissemination is of quite subordinate importance, it remains for me, if I do not weary you, to add a few remarks of a more or less desultory character on the theory itself as presented in the light of what I have already said.
No one can doubt that dissemination has taken place. The hypothesis I stated so broadly just now as the anthropological theory of folk-tales cannot be held without qualification. Happily it is not requisite to hold it without qualification. The anthropological theory of folk-tales no more excludes the possibility of multitudes of instances of dissemination than the anthropological theory of civilisation—the theory that the history of man is, on the whole, a history of progress—excludes the possibility of many a temporary and partial retrogression. The business of a theory is to explain facts, not to distort them. In Europe, for many hundred years, tales have passed from books into tradition, and back again from tradition into books, so that their transmission is to a large extent capable of being traced. This has been the case especially with some kinds of tales, like the apologue and the anecdote. Drolls, or comic tales, have obtained a wide circulation; and there seems reason to believe that many of them are to be accounted for by direct verbal transmission. But märchen also, and even sagas, have sometimes been transmitted. Nobody, for example, can read La Lanterna Magica, obtained for Dr. Pitré by Professor Letterio Lizio-Bruno, at Rocca Valdina, near Messina, or La Lanterna, a variant taken down by Dr. Pitré himself at Palermo, without being strongly impressed with the probability that this story has been derived directly from
- ↑ Cf. Codtington, The Melanesians, 356.
