f absorption. In all cases it is the duty
of the student to note the stage of arrested development in the
primitive rite, custom, or belief, whether it be caused by antagonism
or by absorption. It is at this point, indeed, that the history of the
survival begins. It is here that we have to turn from the polity, the
religion, or cultus of a people to the belief, practices, or
superstition of that portion of our nation which has not shared its
progress from tribesmen to citizens, from paganism to Christianity,
from vain imaginings to science and philosophy. It is from this point
we have to turn from the dignity of courts, the doings of armies, and
the results of commerce, to the doings, sayings, and ideas of the
peasantry who cannot read, and who have depended upon tradition for
all, or almost all, they know outside the formalities of law and
Church.

FOOTNOTES:

[444] _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ (Bury), iii. 214-15.

[445] _Royal Irish Academy_, viii. 258; _Brit. Arch. Assoc._
(Gloucester volume), 62.

[446] "The Story of the Ere Dwellers," Morris, _Saga Library_, ii. 8.

[447] Camden, _Britannia_, s.v. "Ireland."

[448] Henderson, _Folklore of Northern Counties_, 16.

[449] Glas, _Canary Islands_, 148.

[450] Betham, _Gael and Cymbri_, pp. 236-8.

[451] _Decline and Fall_, iii. p. 214 (edit. Bury).

[452] Grimm, _Teutonic Mythology_, by Stallybrass, iii. pp. 35, 36. A
passage from Hakon's Saga, quoted by Du Chaillu in his _Viking Age_, i.
p. 464, shows that the northern peoples adopted the same measures.

[453] Beda, lib. i. cap. 30; and consult Mr. Plummer's learned notes on
this (vol. ii. 57-61).

[454] Stanley, _Memorials of Canterbury_, 37-38.

[455] _Cf._ my _Ethnology in Folklore_, 30-36, 136-140. Compare St.
Patrick's dedication of pagan sacred stones to Christian
purposes.--_Tripartite Life of St. Patrick_, i. 107.

[456] Thus Henry of Huntingdon records that Redwald, King of the East
Angles, after his conversion to Christianity, "set up altars to Christ
and the devil in the same chapel" (lib. iii.).

[457] _Cf._ Kemble, _Saxons in England_, i. 330-335. Dr. Hearn writes:
"Even as the good Pope Gregory the Great permitted the newly converted
English to retain their old temples and accustomed rites, attaching,
however, to them another purpose and a new meaning, so his successors
found means to utilize the simple beliefs of early animism. Long and
vainly the Church struggled against th