Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 7 1889.djvu/143

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF RUMPELSTILTSKIN.
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soul. He said to a dog: "Wait here, keep watch, and bark." Payana went off and the dog remained. Then Erlik came up. Erlik spoke to deceive it: "Thou hast no hair, I will give thee golden hair; give me that soulless man." The dog, bent on getting golden hair, gave him the man. Erlik spat all over the man. Then came Kudai to give the man a soul, and Erlik bolted. Kudai saw the saliva but could not clean him of it; so he turned the man inside out, for which reason a man's spittle is in his interior. Then Kudai struck the dog. "May thou, dog, be bad," he said, "man can do with thee what he likes; he is allowed to strike thee, to kill thee; thou art a dog out-and-out."


THE PHILOSOPHY OF RUMPELSTILTSKIN.[1]

T

N the last annual Report of the Council to the Members of this Society, the opinion is expressed that the end of its first decade marks a convenient point at which to pause and consider whether the work of collection of materials is, without being arrested, sufficiently advanced to justify the subjecting of those materials to scientific treatment. Science, it is scarcely needful to say, is but another name for knowledge into which orderly arrangement is imported. It is concerned with the deducing of general principles from observation and, where practicable, examination of things; and its method, at least in that branch which is known as applied science, is uniform, namely, to examine, compare, and classify or systematize, with the object of getting at the significance of things.

  1. Read before the Folklore Society, 26th February, 1889.