stigation of
these places and their traditions would, no doubt, lead to many points
in the tribal settlement of the district, an important fact of history
nowhere found in history.

No one, I think, taking into consideration this view of the
relationship of local and personal traditions to history will deny
that history is likely to gain much by the proper interpretation of
such traditions. Every yard of British territory has its historic
interest, and there are innumerable peaks above the general level
which should be worth much to national history. Every epoch of British
history has its great personage, who in popular opinion stands out
from among his fellows. When once it is understood that traditions
attaching to places and persons yield facts of a kind worth searching
for, there will arise the desire to obtain all that is now obtainable
from this source, and to add thereto the deductions to be drawn from
their geographical distribution.

II

If the accretion of myth around the lives of great historic
personages, and the persistence of tradition in historic localities,
may be accepted as one phase of the necessary relationship of
tradition to history, we may proceed to inquire how far the unattached
traditions, the folk-tales pure and simple, contain or are based upon
historic details. These details will not tell us of any one historic
personage, or relate to any one historic locality, but will relate to
the peoples before personages and localities figured in their history,
and will explain facts in culture-history rather than in political
history. We shall be approaching the period before written history had
begun, and for which, so far as written history is concerned, we are
dependent upon foreign or outside authority. I think, perhaps, Dr.
Karl Pearson has put the case for this view in the best form. "As we
read fairy stories to our children," he says,

"we may study history for ourselves. No longer
oppressed with the unreal and the _baroque_, we may
see primitive human customs and the life of primitive
man and woman cropping out at almost every sentence of
the nursery tale. Written history tells us little of
these things, they must be learnt, so to speak, from
the mouths of babes. But there they are in the
_Maerchen_, as invaluable fossils for those who will
stoop to pick them up and study them. Back in the far
past we can build up the life of