until he shall address himself to this task, however ingenious his
guesses, however amusing his philology, however delightfully wild his
literary and historical arguments, he will not succeed in convincing any
serious student.

Here then we must pause. Obvious are the differences between the nations
of mankind: differences of physical conformation,--that is to say, of
race; divergences of mental and moral development,--that is to say, of
civilization. Hitherto the task attempted by folklore has been to show
that underlying all these differences there is a broad foundation of
common agreement; that distinctions of race do not extend to mental and
moral constitution; that the highest nation on the ladder of culture has
climbed from the same rung on which the lowest are yet standing; and
that the absurd and incongruous customs and institutions and the equally
absurd and impossible stories and beliefs found imbedded in the
civilization of the more advanced nations are explicable, and explicable
only, as relics of the phases wherethrough those nations have passed
from the depths of savagery.

If it be admitted in general terms that the evidence collected and
marshalled up to the present time has established among sure scientific
facts so much of the past of humanity, this achievement is but the
beginning of toil. A wide field has been opened to the student for the
collection and arrangement of details, before the true meaning of many a
strange custom and stranger tale will be thoroughly understood. I have
tried to do something of the kind in the foregoing pages. But beyond
this there is the more delicate investigation of the ethnic element in
folklore. Can we assign to the various races their special shares in the
development of a common tradition? Can we show what direction each race
took, and how and why it modified the general inheritance?

On the other hand, it is not asserted that the status of savagery was
the primitive condition of men. Of course it may have been. But if not,
there is work to be done in endeavouring to ascertain what lies behind
it. The questions started from this point wander across the border of
folklore into pure psychology; but it is a psychology based not upon
introspection and analysis of the mind of the civilized man, developed
under the complex influences that have been acting and reacting during
untold years of upward struggling, always arduous and often cruel, but a
psychology which must