particulars in her valuable
_Shropshire Folklore_.[424] But for the most part this portion of our
evidence wants picking out by a long and tedious process from the mass
of badly recorded facts about popular superstitions. I do not believe
in the generally stated opinion that certain superstitions are
universally believed or practised. It is difficult to prove a
negative, and such evidence is not absolutely scientific, but when it
comes in direct antithesis to positive, there does not seem any harm
in accepting it. Every class of superstition wants tracing out
geographically, and local variants want careful noting. I cannot doubt
if this were properly done that many so-called universal superstitions
would be found to be distinctly local. In the meantime, it is not with
universal superstitions that we have to deal. It is primarily with
those local variants which show us side by side the differences of
belief. It is thus that we can afford evidence of that intermixture
of totem-objects which is to be expected from the known facts of
totem-beliefs and customs. Indeed, Mr. McLennan has laid it down that
"we might expect that while here and there perhaps a tribe might
appear with a single animal god, as a general rule tribes and nations
should have as many animal and vegetable gods as there were distinct
stocks in the population ... we should not expect to find the same
animal dominant in all quarters, or worshipped even everywhere within
the same nation."[425]

It is important that we should thoroughly understand what these
survivals of totemism in the British isles really mean. On the extreme
west coast of Ireland, farthest away from the centres of civilisation,
there are found these unique examples of a savage institution. The
argument that they might have been transplanted thither by travellers
from the far west, where totemism has developed to its highest form,
cannot seriously be advanced. The argument that they might be the
accidental form into which some merely superstitious fancies of
ignorant peasants happened to have ultimately shaped themselves, is
met by the mathematical demonstration that the ratio of chance against
such a development would be well-nigh incalculable. The remaining
argument is that they indicate the last outpost, or perhaps one of the
last outposts, of a primitive savage organisation which once existed
throughout these lands. This is the view that appears to me to be the
only possible one to me