CHAPTER IV

ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONDITIONS

N dealing with the folklore of any country, it is important to note the general bearing of anthropological conditions. The earliest inhabitants, to whom part of the folklore belonged, and the later peoples, to whom part belonged, have both arrived at their ultimate point of settlement in the country where we discover their folklore after being in touch with many points of the world's surface. They are both world-people as well as national people-they belonged to anthropology before they came under the dominion of history. This important fact is often or nearly always neglected. We are apt to treat of Greek and Roman and Briton, of Cretan, Scandinavian, and Russian, as bounded by the few thousands of years of life which have fixed them with their territorial names, and to ignore all that lies behind this historic period. There is, as a matter of fact, an immense period behind it, reckoned according to geological time in millions of years, and this period, longer in duration, more strenuous in its influences upon character and mind, containing more representatives in peoples, societies, and races than the later period, has affected the later period to a far greater extent than is generally con

ceded or understood. period without knowing something of the earlier period.

We cannot understand the later

There is more than this; for the dominating political races occupying European countries to-day were, in most cases, preceded by a non-political people. Thus, if we turn to Britain for illustration, we find evidence of a people physically allied with a race which cannot be identified with Celt or Teuton,1 philologically allied with a people which spoke a non-Aryan language,2 archæologically allied with the prehistoric stone-circle and monolith builders, and we find custom, belief, and myth in Britain retaining traces of a culture which is not Celtic and not Teutonic, and which contains survivals of the primitive system of totemism. These four independent classes of evidence have to be combined if we would ascertain the true position they occupy in the history of Britain, and it is perfectly clear that, apart from general considerations, a direct appeal to anthropology is necessary to help out the deficiencies of both history and folklore. The questions involved in

1 Beddoe, Races of Britain, cap. ii., and Journ. Anthrop. Inst., xxxv. 236-7; Boyd-Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, cap. vii. viii. and ix. ; Ripley, Races of Europe, cap. xii.

2

Rhys, Celtic Britain, 271; Rhys, Celtic Heathendom, passim; Rhys and Jones, Welsh People, cap. i. and Appendix B on "Pre-Aryan Syntax in Insular Celtic," by Professor Morris Jones.

3 Barrows, mounds, tumuli, stone circles, monoliths are generally admitted to belong to the Stone Age people before the Celts arrived, and when they are adequately investigated, as Mr. Arthur Evans has investigated Stonehenge (Archæological Review, vol. ii. pp. 312-330), and the Rollright Stones (Folklore, vol. vi. pp. 5-51), the evidence of a prehistoric origin is unquestioned.

'I have worked out the evidence for this in the Archæological Review, vol. iii. pp. 217-242, 350-375, and though I do not endorse all I have written there, the main points are still, I think, good.

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totemism alone compel us to this course. It is questionable whether there is any existing savage or barbaric people who are non-totemic in the sense of either not possessing the rudimentary beginnings of totemism, or not having once possessed a full system of totemism. Totemism, at one stage or another of its development, is, in fact, one of the universal elements of man's life, and all consideration of its traces in civilised countries must begin with some conception of its origin. Its origin must refer back to conditions of human life which are also universal. Special circumstances, special peoples, special areas could not have produced totemism unless we proceed to the somewhat violent conclusion that beginning in one area it has spread therefrom to all areas. I know of no authority who advocates such a theory and no evidence in its favour. We are left therefore with the proposition that the origin of totemism must be sought for in some universal condition of human life at one of its very early stages, which would have produced a state of things from which would inevitably arise the beliefs, customs, and social organisations which are included under the term totemism.

There is therefore ample ground for a consideration of anthropological conditions as part of the necessary equipment of the study of folklore as an historical science. Unfortunately, authorities are now greatly divided on several important questions in anthropology, and it is not possible to speak with even a reasonable degree of certainty on many things. This compels further research than the mere statement of the present position, and I find myself obliged even for my present limited

purpose to suggest many new points beyond the stage reached by present research. There is one advantage in this. It allows of a hypothesis by which to present the subject to the student, and a working hypothesis is always a great advantage where research is not founded entirely on actual observation by trained experts in the field. Where, therefore, I depart from the guidance of conclusions already arrived at by scholars in this department of research, it will be in order to substitute an opinion of my own which I think it is necessary to consider, and the whole study of the anthropological problems in their relation to folklore will assume the shape of a restatement of the entire

case.

I am aware that a subject of this magnitude is too weighty and far-reaching to be properly considered in a chapter of a book not devoted to the single purpose, but it is necessary to attempt a rough statement of the evidence, though it will take us somewhat beyond the ordinary domain of folklore; but, while dealing with the anthropological position at sufficient length to make a complicated subject clear, if I can do so, I shall limit both my arguments and the evidence in support of them to the narrowest limits.

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Mr. Wallace, I think, supplies the dominant note of the anthropological position when he suggests, though in a strangely unsatisfactory terminology, that it is the conscious use by man of his experience which causes his superior mental endowments, and his superior range of

development.1 We must lay stress upon the important qualification "conscious." It is conscious use of experience which is the great factor in man's progress. It is the greatest possession of man in his beginning, and has remained his greatest possession ever since. His experience did not always lead him to the best paths of progress, but it has led him to progress.

Even Mr. Wallace did not appreciate the full significance of this principle. The conscious adoption of a natural fact, of an observation from nature, or an assumed observation from nature, for social purposes, is an altogether different thing from the unconscious knowledge which man might have been possessed of, but which he never put to any use in his social development. Anthropologists must note not the natural facts known to later man or known to science, but the facts, or assumed facts, which early man consciously adopted for his purpose during the long period of his development from savage to civilised forms of life. The unconscious acts of mankind are of no use, or of very little use. It is only the conscious acts that will lead us along the lines of man's development. Man did not begin to build up his social system with the scientific fact of blood kinship through father and mother, but he evolved a theory of social relationship which served his purpose until the fact of blood kinship supplied a better basis. At almost the first point of origin in savage society we see man acting consciously, and it is amongst his conscious acts that we

1 Wallace, Darwinism, cap. xv.