re soon finds that he must enlarge his
field, and examine, not only popular European story and practice, but
savage ways and ideas, and the myths and usages of the educated classes
in civilised races. In this extended sense the term 'folklore' will
frequently be used in the following essays. The idea of the writer is
that mythology cannot fruitfully be studied apart from folklore, while
some knowledge of anthropology is required in both sciences.

The science of Folklore, if we may call it a science, finds everywhere,
close to the surface of civilised life, the remains of ideas as old as
the stone elf-shots, older than the celt of bronze. In proverbs and
riddles, and nursery tales and superstitions, we detect the relics of a
stage of thought, which is dying out in Europe, but which still exists in
many parts of the world. Now, just as the flint arrow-heads are
scattered everywhere, in all the continents and isles, and everywhere are
much alike, and bear no very definite marks of the special influence of
race, so it is with the habits and legends investigated by the student of
folklore. The stone arrow-head buried in a Scottish cairn is like those
which were interred with Algonquin chiefs. The flints found in Egyptian
soil, or beside the tumulus on the plain of Marathon, nearly resemble the
stones which tip the reed arrow of the modern Samoyed. Perhaps only a
skilled experience could discern, in a heap of such arrow-heads, the
specimens which are found in America or Africa from those which are
unearthed in Europe. Even in the products of more advanced industry, we
see early pottery, for example, so closely alike everywhere that, in the
British Museum, Mexican vases have, ere now, been mixed up on the same
shelf with archaic vessels from Greece. In the same way, if a
superstition or a riddle were offered to a student of folklore, he would
have much difficulty in guessing its _provenance_, and naming the race
from which it was brought. Suppose you tell a folklorist that, in a
certain country, when anyone sneezes, people say 'Good luck to you,' the
student cannot say a priori what country you refer to, what race you have
in your thoughts. It may be Florida, as Florida was when first
discovered; it may be Zululand, or West Africa, or ancient Rome, or
Homeric Greece, or Palestine. In all these, and many other regions, the
sneeze was welcomed as an auspicious omen. The little superstition is as
widely distributed a