and other customs, common in many countries. . . . Tales of a similar character, turning on transgression of a nuptial taboo, might and did occur, probably independently, among Zulus and Red Indians . . . they differ greatly in detail and ‘sequence of adventure’ . . . [but] they might also have been transmitted in the unknown past of our race.” As far back as 1886 he made the remark, “Wherever human communication is or has been possible, there the story can go.”[1]
Mr. Joseph Jacobs constantly appears as the protagonist against the so-called “anthropological school,” to which he applied the epithet “casual.” He has drawn a distinction of what he terms “vertical” and “lateral” tradition, the former being what is directly handed down in one area from generation to generation, the latter being what has crept in from without. He asks,[2] “What criterion has been discovered to distinguish between vertical and lateral tradition? I can see none, and until some such criterion has been discovered I cannot see how we can use tradition for ethnological purposes . . . [neither] the survivals found in folk-tales [nor] those found in custom can be used as evidence of the former existence of the beliefs on which those survivals are founded in the actual place where either tale or custom is now to be met with. Man has struggled upward from savagery, but by the struggle for existence among the survivals of savagery many of them have disappeared, to be replaced by others from alien sources: who shall say at this time of day which are native, which alien?” He also points out that primitive savage incidents in folk-tales or folk-custom may have been introduced into a country when they had already arrived at the stage of survivals. Mr, Jacobs discussed the problem from the literary point of view, and taking such incidents as he alluded to by themselves it does seem practically impossible to distinguish between what is inherited and what is
- ↑ Cf. Folk-Lore, iv. 1893, p. 417.
- ↑ Folk-Lore, v. 1894, pp. 140, 141.
