Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/117

in which folk-lore students have to deal; and it must be grappled with manfully, if the study is ever to be more than an interesting literary pastime. For we must never forget that the term folk-lore embraces a very wide area, and that all traditional learning must be investigated on the same principles. To prove transmission from a centre in the case of stories involves a presumption in its favour in the case of other folk-belief, and ultimately, therefore, in the case of traditional customs. Now it would, of course, be absurd to deny that strong races have often imposed their language, laws, and practices by force or persuasion upon their weaker brethren. In like manner superstitious songs and tales have been wafted from land to land. The advocates, however, of the theory we are considering—that of transmission from a given centre—are bound by the narrow limits of historical time; and, unfortunately for them, folk-tales have been found older than Buddha, and in other lands than India. To meet this difficulty, Judea has been suggested by one set of theorists, and Egypt by another, as the starting-point. We need not further allude on this occasion to these offshoots from the main theory: the objections applicable to it are, with slight variations, applicable to them also. It is only necessary here to insist that, inasmuch as the theory has its limits within historical time, the burden of proof lies upon its advocates, and that in each individual instance. Now, the course of their argument demands a number of suitable vehicles of transmission. Many of these, applicable undoubtedly to limited areas, have been suggested, such as conquest, trade, literary intercourse, and the movements of that singular people known to us as the Gipsies. Of these, as it might have been predicted, literature, from the permanent character of its records, has proved the most manageable by far; with its aid the revelationists, as they have been called, have been able to bridge more chasms, traverse greater distances, and arrive nearer to probabilities than by any other means.