ead us back to some
unexplored epoch of history, some undated period, which has not
revealed its heroes, but which has left us a heritage of its mental
strivings.

The method of using these notes of custom, rite, and belief for
scientific purposes is therefore a very important matter. It is
essential that each single item should be treated definitely and
separately from all other items, and, further, that the exact wording
of the original note upon each separate item should be kept intact.
There must be no juggling with the record, no emendations such as
students of early literary work are so fond of attempting. Whatever
the record, it must be accepted. The original account of every custom
and belief is a corpus, not to be tampered with except for the purpose
of scientific analysis, and then after that purpose has been effected
all the parts must be put together again, and the original restored to
its form.

The handling of each custom or belief and of its separate parts in
this way enables us, in the first place, to disentangle it from the
particular personal or social stratum in which it happens to have been
preserved. It may have become attached to a place, an object, a
season, a class of persons, a rule of life, and may have been
preserved by means of this attachment. But because every item of
folklore of the same nature is not attached to the same agent
wherever that particular item has been preserved, it is important not
to stereotype an accidental association as a permanent one. Moreover,
the modern association is not necessarily the ancient association, and
there is the further difficulty created by writers on folklore
classifying into chapters of their own creation the items they collect
or discuss.[223] In the second place, we are enabled to prepare each
item of folklore for the place to which it may ultimately be found to
belong. The first step in this preparation is to get together all the
examples of any one custom, rite, or belief which have been preserved,
and to compare these examples with each other, first as to common
features of likeness, secondly as to features of unlikeness. By this
process we are able to restore what may be deficient from the
insufficiency of any particular record--and such a restoration is
above all things essential--and to present for examination not an
isolated specimen but a series of specimens, each of which helps to
bring back to observation some portion of the original. T