have lost their social utility, and in this sense they are social vestiges.
Sir Laurence Gomme has stated that, “Survivals are carried along the stream of time by people whose culture-status is on a level with the culture in which the survivals originated. It matters not that these people are placed in the midst of a higher civilisation or alongside of a higher civilisation. When once the higher civilisation penetrates to them the survival is lost [or becomes an attenuated vestige]. There is not continuity between modern and primitive thought here, but, on the contrary, there is strong antagonism, ending with the defeat and death of the primitive survival. . . . It is, indeed, a mistake to suppose, as some authorities apparently do, that survivals can only be studied when they are embedded in a high civilisation. It is almost a more fruitful method to study them when they appear in the lower strata. . . . The doctrine of evolution is so strong upon us that we are apt to apply its leading ideas insensibly to almost every branch of human history. But folklore being what it is, namely, the survival of traditional ideas or practices among a people whose principal members have passed beyond the stage of civilisation which these ideas and practices once represented, it is impossible for it to have any development.”[1] Elsewhere he says, “To deal adequately with these survivals is the accepted province of the science of folklore, and it must therefore account for their existence, must point out the causes for their arrested development, and the causes for their long continuance in a state of crystallisation or degradation after the stoppage has been effected.”[2]
I do not desire to elaborate my point, but I would merely like to suggest that it might be useful if folklorists bore in mind the distinctions I have endeavoured to
- ↑ Folklore as an Historical Science, 1908, pp. 156-7.
- ↑ Ethnology in Folklore, 1892, p. II.
