The ballad - Index of

^ Ballad
-^
itA
tion and repetition. Lore, which means things
learned, begins for a baby from the moment that
he correlates his senses with their simple functions
; literature, which means things written,
has to wait for two of the three R's. So long as
a child remains illiterate, even literature received
by him as from a book read aloud becomes
lore to him as he takes it in. All children know
by heart nursery rhymes and so forth long before
observe that in
they can read ;
and we may
children unable to read, as in other illiterate per-
that is
sons, there exists a power of memory
quickly tarnished by
the introduction of the
mechanical means of record.
Let us now take the baby's phylogenetic
parallel, primitive Man let us
; envisage a community
of adults, with the minds of modern
babies, living in the days before Taffimai Metallumai
began to discover the rudiments of writing.
No one can reasonably suppose that our ancestors,
in the course of evolution, did not achieve
a stage of intellectual interchange in which the
means of communication were purely oral ;
for
any such objector can be confronted not only
with the baby parallel, but with the fact that
even to-day and even in the most advanced and
cultivated nations, illiterate people can be found,
whose exchange of ideas is effected simply by
oral means : not to mention innumerable tribes
of " savages " that is, primitive man in all
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