little girl saw there was one of Cadi's sisters having a bad leg dressed: when the rag which had been on the wound was removed, the mother made one of her other children take it out and fix it on the thorn growing near the door. The little girl being inquisitive asked why that was done, and she was told that it was in order that the wound might heal all the faster. She was not very satisfied with the answer, but she afterwards noticed the same sort of thing done in her own neighbourhood. Now the original idea was doubtless that the disease, or at any rate a part of it—and in such matters it will be remembered that a part is quite equal to the whole-was attached to the rag; so that putting the rag out, with a part of the disease attached to it, to rot on the bush, would bring with it the disappearance of the whole disease.

Another and a wider aspect of this practice was the subject of notice in the chapter on the Folklore of the Wells, pp. 359-60, where Mr. Hartland's hypothesis was mentioned. This was to the effect that if any clothing, or anything else which had been identified with your person, were to be placed in contact with a sacred tree, sacred well, or sacred edifice, it would be involved in the effluence of the divinity that imparts its sacred character to the tree, well, or temple; and that your person, identified with the clothing or other article, would also be involved or soaked in the same divine effluence, and made to benefit thereby. We have since had this kind of reasoning illustrated, pp. 405-7 above, by the modern legend of Crymlyn, and the old one of ILyn ILiwan; but the difficulty which it involves is a very considerable one: it is the difficulty of taking seriously the infantile order of reasoning which underlies so much of the philosophy of folklore. I cannot readily forget one of the first occasions of my coming,

so to say, into living contact with it. It was at Tuam in Connaught, whither I had gone to learn modern Irish from the late Canon Ulick J. Bourke. There one day in 1871 he presented me with a copy of The Bull'Ineffabilis' in Four Languages (Dublin, 1868), containing the Irish version which he had himself contributed. On the blue cover was a gilt picture of the Virgin, inscribed Sine Labe Concepta. No sooner had I brought it to my lodgings than the woman who looked after the house caught sight of it. She was at once struck with awe and admiration; so I tried to explain to her the nature of the contents of the volume. 'So the Father has given you that holy book!' she exclaimed; 'and you are now a holy man!' I was astonished at the simple and easy way in which she believed holiness could be transferred from one person or thing to another; and it has always helped me to realize the fact that folklorists have no occasion to invent their people, or to exaggerate the childish features of their minds. They are still with us as real men and real women, and at one time the whole world belonged to them; not to mention that those who may, by a straining of courtesy, be called their leaders of thought, hope speedily to reannex the daring few who are trying to tear asunder the bonds forged for mankind in the obscurity of a distant past. I shall never forget the impression made on my mind by a sermon I heard preached some years later in the cathedral of St. Stephen in Vienna. That magnificent edifice in a great centre of German culture was crowded with listeners, who seemed thoroughly to enjoy what they heard, though the chief idea which they were asked to entertain could not possibly be said to rise above the level of the philosophy of the Stone Age.

CHAPTER XI

FOLKLORE PHILOSOPHY

To look for consistency in barbaric philosophy is to disqualify ourselves for understanding it, and the theories of it which aim at symmetry are their own condemnation. Yet that philosophy, within its own irregular confines, works not illogically.-EDWARD CLODD.

It will be remembered that in the last chapter a story was given, p. 602, which represented the soul as a little fellow somewhat resembling a monkey; and it will probably have struck the reader how near this approaches the idea prevalent in medieval theology and Christian art, which pictured the soul as a pigmy or diminutive human being. I revert to this in order to point out that the Christian fancy may possibly have given rise to the form of the soul as represented in the Welsh story which I heard in Cardiganshire and Professor Sayce in Monmouthshire; but this could hardly be regarded as touching the other Cardiganshire story, in which the soul is likened to a madfatt or lizard. Moreover I would point out that a belief incompatible with both kinds of story is suggested by one of the uses of the Welsh word for soul, namely, enaid. I heard my father, a native of the neighbourhood of Eglwys Fach, near the estuary of the Dyfi, use the word of some portion of the inside of a goose, but I have forgotten what part it was exactly. Professor Anwyl of Aberystwyth, however, has sent me the following communication on the subject:-'I am quite familiar with the expression yr enaid, "the soul," as applied to the soft flesh sticking to the ribs inside a goose. The

flesh in question has somewhat the same appearance and structure as the liver. I have no recollection of ever hearing the term yr enaid used in the case of any bird other than a goose; but this may be a mere accident, inasmuch as no one ever uses the term now except to mention it as an interesting curiosity.' This application of the word enaid recalls the use of the English word 'soul' in the same way, and points to a very crude idea of the soul as material and only forming an internal portion of the body: it is on the low level of the notion of an English pagan of the seventeenth century who thought his soul was 'a great bone in his body'.' It is, however, not quite so foolish, perhaps, as it looks at first sight; and it reminds one of the Mohammedan belief that the os coccygis is the first formed in the human body, and that it will remain uncorrupted till the last day as a seed from which the whole is to be renewed in the resurrection 2.

On either savage theory, that the soul is a material organism inside a bulkier organism, or the still lower one that it is an internal portion of the larger organism itself, the idea of death would be naturally much the same, namely, that it was what occurred when the body and the soul became permanently severed. I call attention to this because we have traces in Welsh literature of a very different notion of death, which must now be briefly explained. The Mabinogi of Math ab Mathonwy relates how Math and Gwydion made out of various flowers a most beautiful woman whom they named Blodeuwed3, that is to say aveons, or flowerlike,

1 See Mr. Gomme's presidential address to the Folk-Lore Society, printed in Folk-Lore for 1892, pp. 6-7.

'See Sale's preliminary discourse to his translation of the Koran, § iv.

3 Perhaps we may regard this as the more Goidelic account of Blodeuwed's origin at any rate, traces of a different one have been noticed in a note at P. 439 above.

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and gave to wife to Lew Lawgyffes; how she, as it were to prove what consummate artists they had been, behaved forthwith like a woman of the ordinary origin, in that she fell in love with another man named Gronw Pebyr of Pentlyn; and how she plotted with Gronw as to the easiest way to put her husband to death. Pretending to be greatly concerned about the welfare of Lew and very anxious to take measures against his death (angheu), she succeeded in finding from him in what manner one could kill (tad) him. His reply was, 'Unless God kill me . . . it is not easy to kill me'; and he went on to describe the strange attitude in which he might be killed, namely, in a certain position when dressing after a bath: then, he said, if one cast a spear at him it would effect his death (angheu), but that spear must have been a whole year in the making, during the hour only when the sacrifice was proceeding on Sunday. Blodeuwed thanked heaven, she said, to find that all this was easy to avoid. But still her curiosity was not satisfied; so one day she induced ILew to go into the bath and show exactly what he meant. Of course she had Gronw with his enchanted spear in readiness, and at the proper moment, when Lew was dressing after the bath, the paramour cast his spear at him. He hit him in the side, so that the head of the spear remained in ILew, whilst the shaft fell off: ILew flew away in the form of an eagle, uttering an unearthly cry. He was no more seen until Gwydion, searching for him far and wide in Powys and Gwyned, came to Arfon, where one day he followed the lead of a mysterious sow, until the beast stopped under an oak at Nantlle. There Gwydion found the sow devouring rotten flesh and maggots, which fell from an eagle whenever the bird shook himself at the top of the tree. He suspected this was ILew, and on singing three englyns