the anthropologist, are religious enough. Mr. Tylor then discounts reports which are hasty, or made in ignorance, and finds that there is still left that enormous body of testimony on which he bases his theory of savage philosophies, religions, and mythologies. Mr. Tylor, to be brief, judges evidence by the tests we have already proposed. The inquirer "is bound to use his best judgment as to the trustworthiness of all the authors he quotes … but it is over and above these measures of precautions that the test of recurrence comes in." By "recurrence" Mr. Tylor means what we have called "undesigned coincidence." Thus, "if two independent visitors to different countries, say a mediæval Mahommedan in Tartary, and a modern Englishman in Dahome, or a Jesuit missionary in Brazil, and a Wesleyan in the Fijian Islands, agree in describing some analogousart or rite or myth among the people they have visited, it becomes difficult or impossible to set down such correspondence to accident or wilful fraud" (Primitive Culture, i. 9.)
Such, then, are our tests of reported evidence. Both the quantity and the quality of the testimony seem to justify an anthropological examination of the origin of myths and märchen. As to the savage ideas from which we believe these märchen to spring we have yet stronger evidence.[1]
We have the evidence of institutions. It may be hard to understand what a savage thinks, but it is comparatively easy to know what he does. Now the whole of savage existence, roughly speaking, is based on and swayed by two great institutions. The first is the division of society into a number of clans or stocks. The marriage laws of
- ↑ Mr. Ralston (Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1879) seems to think that the historical interpreters of märchen wish to resolve all incidents into traces of actual customs. But traces of customs are few, compared with survivals of ideas, or states of opinion, or "wild beliefs" of which Mr. Ralston (p. 852, loc. cit.) himself contributes an example.
