our ancestry--the
little kingdom, the queen or her daughter as king
maker, the simple life of the royal household, and the
humble candidate for the kingship, the priestess with
her control of the weather and her power over youth
and maid. In the dimmest distance we can see traces of
the earlier kindred group marriage, and in the near
foreground the beginnings of that fight with
patriarchal institutions which led the priestess to be
branded by the new Christian civilization as the
evil-working witch of the Middle Ages."[53]

I should not have ventured to quote this long passage if my own
studies, before Dr. Pearson's book was published in 1897, had not led
me to much the same conclusions.[54] But Dr. Pearson assists me in a
special way. His methods are scientific. He is not a folklorist
because he loves folklore, but because he sees in it the materials
for elucidating the early life of man. He is not, so to speak,
prejudiced in its favour. He brings to his aid the practical mind of
the statistician and the psychologist, and his conclusions may not,
therefore, be put on one side as easily as those of myself and other
students of folklore.

It is due to the folklorist, however, to say that this aspect of the
folk-tale had already been discovered by one of the greatest of the
earlier collectors of traditional lore, the late Mr. J. F. Campbell.
Thus, writing, in 1860, of his grand collection of "Highland Tales,"
Mr. Campbell very truly says: "The tales represent the actual everyday
life of those who tell them, with great fidelity. They have done the
same, in all likelihood, time out of mind, and that which is not true
of the present is, in all probability, true of the past; and therefore
something may be learned of forgotten ways of life."[55] Readers of
Mr. Campbell's books well know how he has traced out from these
traditions from the nursery, identical customs with Highland everyday
life, and relics also of a long-forgotten past state of things; how he
points to the records of the stone age and the iron age in these
representatives of the scientific memoirs of the past; how very
significantly he answers his own supposition, that if these tales "are
dim recollections of savage times and savage people, then other magic
gear, the property of giants, fairies, and bogles, should resemble
things which are precious now amongst savage or half-civilized tribes,
or whi