Arabia in hills and rocks; and that both in this country and in the far East they inveigled unhappy mortals into their dwellings and kept them for generations—nay, for centuries. That the Shoshone of California should dread their infants being changed by the Ninumbees, or dwarfs, in the same way as the Celts of the British Islands, and the Teutons too, dreaded their infants being changed, does not seem at all incredible to me. That to eat the food of the dead in New Zealand prevents a living man from returning to the land of the living, just as Persephone was retained in Hades by partaking of the pomegranate, and just as to eat the food of fairies hinders the Manx or the Hebrew adventurer from rejoining his friends on the surface of the earth, is in no way perplexing to me. But all these things, and they might be multiplied indefinitely, must be very perplexing to Mr. MacRitchie, if he be not prepared to prove that Annamites and Arabs, Hebrews and Shoshone, New Zealanders and classical Greeks alike, were acquainted with the Picts and the Finns, and alike celebrated them in their traditions.
The truth Mr. MacRitchie does not reckon with is, that no theory will explain the nature and origin of the fairy superstitions which does not also explain the nature and origin of every other supernatural being worshipped or dreaded by uncivilized mankind throughout the world. And until he shall address himself to this task, however ingenious his guesses, however amusing his philology, however delightfully wild his literary and historical arguments, he will not succeed in convincing any serious student.
Here then we must pause. Obvious are the differences between the nations of mankind: differences of physical conformation,—that is to say, of race; divergences of mental and moral development,—that is to say, of civilization. Hitherto the task attempted by folklore has been to show that underlying all these differences there is a broad foundation of common agreement; that distinctions
