PTER VII

ETHNOLOGICAL CONDITIONS

Already I have had to point out that an appeal to ethnological
evidence is the means of avoiding the wholesale rejection of custom
and belief recorded of early Britain, because it has been rejected as
appertaining to the historic Celt. I will now proceed with the
definite proposition that the survivals in folklore may be allocated
and explained by their ethnological bearing.

Some years ago I advanced this proposition in my little book entitled
_Ethnology in Folklore_. Only haltingly have my conclusions been
accepted, but I nowhere find them disproved,[466] while here and there
I find good authorities appealing to the ethnological element in
folklore to help them in their views. Mr. MacCulloch, for instance,
prefers to go for the basis of the Osiris and Dionysius myths to an
earlier custom than that favoured by Mr. Frazer and Mr. Grant Allen,
namely, to the practices of the neolithic folk, in Egypt and over a
wide tract of country which includes Britain, of dismembering the
dead body previous to its burial.[467] Mr. Lang, Mr. Frazer, Mr.
Hartland, and others are strangely reticent on this subject. That Mr.
Lang should be content to trace a story from the Vedas, in which
Urvasi tells Pururavas that he must never let her see him naked, to "a
traditional Aryan law of nuptial etiquette,"[468] seems to be using
the heaviest machinery for the smallest purposes, while for other and
greater purposes he fails to find in ethnological distinctions,
explanations which escape his research.[469] That Mr. Frazer should
have been able to examine in so remarkable a manner the agricultural
rites of European peoples, and only to have touched upon their
ethnological bearings in one or two isolated cases, seems to me to be
neglecting one of the obvious means of arriving at the solution of the
problem he starts out to solve.[470]

I do not want to discount these fragmentary appeals to the
ethnological element in folklore. I accept them as evidence that the
appeal has to be made. I would only urge that it may be done on more
thorough lines, after due consideration of all the elements of the
proposition and of all that it means to the study of folklore. We
cannot surrender to the palaeontologist all that folklore contains in
tradition and in custom as to pygmy peoples, or to the Egyptologist
all that it contains as to dismemberment burial rites, without at the
same time realising that if it is correct