Discussion.
Mr. W. F. Kirby called the attention of the Conference to Mr. Jacobs' proposal of tabulating the incidents of folk-tales in such a way as to be able to get a whole tale in a few words for scientific purposes. It almost seemed to him that such a plan was feasible. He had never heartily approved of the present way of tabulating folk-tales, which seemed to him to involve too cumbersome and gigantic a task. The plan which Mr. Jacobs advocated seemed to him much more feasible, and the enormous material which had been collected for some years past by the folk-lore members of the Society of Antiquaries could possibly be utilised much more readily for that purpose than for the tabulation of folk-tales.
Mr. Alfred Nutt said that Mr. Newell's paper and Mr. Lang's remarks upon it touched subjects which must engage the attention of folk-lorists for many years to come, and which bore more or less on one or two particular folk-tales, one of which was the story discussed by Mr. Newell and which Mr. Jacobs had alluded to by referring to some old remarks of his own (Mr. Nutt's) on the subject. He fully and cordially sympathised with the remarks which Mr. Lang had made on the subject of Mr. Newell's paper; it seemed to him that the principle upon which Mr. Newell went was an entirely false one, and in so far as Mr. Jacobs countenanced that theory Mr. Jacobs also was wrong. To him it seemed certain that they must in all cases look to the root rather than the perfect flower: they must seek for the origin of these stories among the rudest and crudest, and not among the most highly perfect and most elaborate forms. If they found all over the world certain detached incidents, and in one particular case all the incidents put together in a story, they must seek for the origin of the incidents separately rather than in conjunction in one complete story. Therefore, it seemed to him that the anthropological school, of which their Chairman was a worthy representative, must be considered superior—in the view of history of mankind—to the school which confined its attention to a complete story, merely endeavouring to trace the origin of that story in a particular country. It seemed to him that the quest of the anthropologists was of more permanent value for the general store of human science than the other, which was only a subsidiary one. The task of the latter, although of great interest in itself, seemed to have its chief value in the hope of tracing by its means those races amongst which particular stories took their rise, and of obtaining some idea as to the special genius and character of that race; but that task was fraught
