than definitely as members of a group. Nevertheless, as the results show, the reproductions themselves illustrate the operation of principles which undoubtedly help to determine the direction and character of conventionalisation as it occurs in everyday experience. And it cannot be forgotten that in none of his reactions is the individual wholly free from influences due immediately to his place in a community.
It often happens that a folk-story which has been developed in a certain social group gets passed on to another which possesses different habits of life and thought, different social institutions, customs, beliefs, and belongs to a widely divergent level of development. Thereupon A, repeating the story to B, involuntarily introduces slight changes, perhaps replacing the name of an object which he has rarely or never seen by that of some other object with which he is familiar. B carries on the same process, and in this manner, by means of a number of alterations, many of them apparently trivial in nature, the material is gradually reduced to a relatively fixed form which, congenial to its new environment, bears only what may be called a "family likeness" to the story as found in the other community. It is then highly probable that, owing to the striking divergencies of the two versions, it will be denied that one could ever have been derived from the other, and a theory of their independent origin will be put forward.
In any attempt experimentally to investigate the problems thus arising, three ways in which change may be induced call for separate study. First, there are those changes which a single individual tends to reproduce by reason of repeated reproductions. Second, there are the results of the numerous successive changes introduced when a series of reproductions are obtained from different individuals, each person operating upon the reproduction of his immediate predecessor in the series. Third, there are the types of change which may be observed when these
