domesticated among any people is of itself evidence of the beliefs or practices of that people, present or past. Stories, we are told, especially some stories, must have been invented once, and once only. It would be too great a draught on our credulity to ask us to believe that a complicated plot, or a long series of incidents, or even a single incident of a remarkable character, was invented in a dozen different places, however similar may be the working of men’s minds. But it may have been handed on from man to man, from tribe to tribe, until it had made the circuit of the world.” With regard to this “dissemination theory,” as Dr. Hartland called it, he pointed out that “to track any story to its place of origin must be a matter of extreme difficulty, as in a very large number of cases the diffusion must have taken place in times so remote that no trustworthy record of the transmission was possible. Also, if it be admitted that folk-tales enshrine relics of archaic thought and archaic practice, which are usually the very structure and essence of the tale, and if such tales would be unintelligible to the people who were strangers to the modes of thought which had produced them, then “we may be reasonably sure that all such tales must, even if borrowed, have embodied ideas and contained allusions to practices familiar to the borrowing peoples, or they would not have been received into their traditions. Tales may thus in general be safely used as evidence of archaic thought and custom once, if not still, rife among the folk who relate them” (p. 20). After asserting that the anthropological theory of folk-tales does not exclude the possibility of multitudes of instances of dissemination, he goes on to point out some of the difficulties of transmission from a foreign source, but admits that, “the conditions for transmission, even of recondite and carefully guarded traditions, must have been fulfilled again and again in the world’s history . . . but if the difficulties of transmission from a foreign source be great, the difficulty of testing such a transmission is equally great” (pp. 31, 32).
