And this kind of vagueness in the primary phenomena of the study
is an absolutely final blow to anything in the nature of a science.
Men can construct a science with very few instruments,
or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could
construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might
work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles,
but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart
into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations.
A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with
a growing reed.

As one of the enormous follies of folk-lore, let us take the case of
the transmigration of stories, and the alleged unity of their source.
Story after story the scientific mythologists have cut out of its place
in history, and pinned side by side with similar stories in their
museum of fables. The process is industrious, it is fascinating,
and the whole of it rests on one of the plainest fallacies in the world.
That a story has been told all over the place at some time or other,
not only does not prove that it never really happened; it does not even
faintly indicate or make slightly more probable that it never happened.
That a large number of fishermen have falsely asserted that they have
caught a pike two feet long, does not in the least affect the question
of whether any one ever really did so. That numberless journalists
announce a Franco-German war merely for money is no evidence one way
or the other upon the dark question of whether such a war ever occurred.
Doubtless in a few hundred years the innumerable Franco-German
wars that did not happen will have cleared the scientific
mind of any belief in the legendary war of '70 which did.
But that will be because if folk-lore students remain at all,
their nature win be unchanged; and their services to folk-lore