A YEAR ago this Society heard and discussed a stimulating paper by Mr. H. W. Howes, on " Some Functional Aspects of European Folklore," (vol. xli, pp. 249-65). Mr. Howes suggested that, in times of crisis, superstition may help us to overcome our fears.In criticism the question was asked, " Why should a peasant or a sailor be more superstitious* than a bricklayer ? " To anyone who has wrestled with pestilence and famine, or has weathered a storm at sea, the answer is easy. The bricklayer lives a sheltered life; his home, his children, his wages, his hours of work and play are " pro tected " ; of the perils of those who grow his food and bring it to him he knows no more than a stall-fed cow.He is, in short, an " urban animal," a " voXm/cov $>oi>,"as Aristotle would call him.In his opening speech at the Round Table Conference Sir Tej Sapru pointed out that " the ordinary member of Parliament has neither the capacity nor the vision necessary to understand the mind and feeling of India." Why not ?I suggest it is because the ideas of an 80 per cent, urban little island are not applicable to a 90 per cent, rural sub-continent.
May I quote a letter I received a few days back from anIndian friend who has just returned home after six years in London? "I can't understand how people manage to live here with such seeming contentment and happiness....
To me they seem a semi-barbarous people."What is the secret of this contentment which seems so 38 Downloaded by [Memorial University of Newfoundland] at 23:44 02 February 2015
HUMAN artifacts can often be very useful to the geologist. When they occur in sufficient numbers and are characteristic, prehistorians can be definite in assigning the industries to a certain culture or cultures, and they can then be utilized by the geologist in the same way as are fossils. In Europe during a part of Quaternary times Lower Palaeolithic cultures flourished. Now Quaternary times in Europe can, of course, be readily subdivided into glacial and interglacial periods, but these naturally did not occur further south. In East Africa geological evidence has been adduced to show that intense pluvial periods took the place of our European glaciations, while during the interglacial phases the African areas suffered from arid conditions. Lower Palaeolithic industries are found at certain levels in East Africa and they enable the geologist to correlate the East African and European sequences. South-East India (Madras) is also not an area where glaciations ever occurred: but, we ask, can geological evidence be adduced to demonstrate climatic changes corresponding to those found to have occurred in East Africa ? Lower Palaeolithic industries occur in great numbers in South-East India; whereas most of them have been merely collected from the surface, and are therefore useless for the purposes of exact dating, a number of finds in situ in definite layers have been made, and as in East Africa these can be used as datum lines for correlating purposes.
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