LITMIR.BIZ

      INTRODUCTION.

       Table of Contents

      It is within every person's experience to enjoy with all attention the tales told by his grand old dames, to climb their knees, to share the envied kiss. There is hardly anybody, I think, who does not look back with fond attachment to those home associations,, witli those innocent sweet simple pleasures, whence first we started into life's long race.. We feel them, while the wings of fancy still are free, even in age and at our latest day.. While the unthinking mind is satisfied with these grandmothers' tales as such, the thinking mind goes a step further and endeavours to gather knowledge from these tales of childhood. There are a good many to whom familiarity breeds contempt, and who, in blissful ignorance, scoff at folklore. But the ethnologist cannot fail to regard it as a sine qua non of the study of the racial development. There are many in whom grandeur hears with a disdainful smile ​these short and simple annals of the poor. But it ought not to be forgotten that these cottages of the poor turn out to be the very nurseries of the wisdom and knowledge which the world has accumulated.

      Bare facts of history are not sufficient for the serious ethnologist. There are limits to the historian's survey of the world. "Thus far shalt thou go and no further" can be applied to history as to other departments of knowledge as well. When, therefore, history tries to disdain the limits of its little reign, it calls in the assistance of folklore," archaeology, phrenology, etc., etc. Though folklore appears to be a very much neglected branch of science, it takes the place of history during

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