lore incidentally. Dr. T. E. Lones, working at the British Museum, has again given valuable help by preliminary examination of these for the guidance of readers. Considerable progress has been made towards covering the ground. The PUBLICATIONS OF THE CHETHAM SOCIETY, of which Miss Faraday some years since made a preliminary examination, are in the competent hands of Miss Dona Torr. It was found necessary to employ paid labour on the VARIA series of "Peter Lombard" (the late Canon Benham), which could only be consulted in the files of the Church Times, and which, as had been foreseen, has yielded a rich harvest. Among the principal local serials yet remaining to be read the Transactions of the Woolhope Club and Fenland Notes and Queries may be mentioned. The Committee will be glad to hear from any readers who will undertake them.

The Committee will also be grateful to any country members who will forward extracts from small Parochial Histories of places in their own neighbourhood. These usually give better results than the large County Histories; they are difficult to meet with in London, and so few of them have yet been dealt with that the senders need not fear their labour will be thrown away.

Notwithstanding the exertions of Miss Hull, Miss Moutray Read, and Sir Bertram Windle, Ireland still remains the weak spot in the collections. Doubtless public events have added to the difficulties already experienced there.

An interesting branch of the enquiry relates to old drawings and engravings illustrating popular customs. This has not been overlooked, and the Committee have under consideration the collection of information as to such contemporary representations. They already possess notes of some examples, and they hope to find much information in the collections made by the distinguished antiquary Francis Douce, now in the Bodleian Library. These

collections have lately been catalogued, and the Committee believe that the reproduction of some of these illustrations would greatly enhance the value of the new edition of Brand's Popular Antiquities.

The grant of £20 made to the Committee by the Society last year has been expended in ordinary clerical assistance, in research work at the Museum, and in typing the Classified Catalogue for printing. This last is sadly expensive in proportion to the means at command, but necessary if the printers' type is to be properly set up so as to display the classification clearly. Voluntary help in type-writing will be gladly accepted. The Committee beg to apply for an equal or, if possible, a larger sum in 1917.

Finally, they beg respectfully to observe that it is only by the whole-hearted co-operation of members that the undertaking can be carried out in a manner worthy of the subject and of our country.

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CULTURE-CONTACT.

SIR EDWARD TYLOR and SIR LAURENCE GOMME, two original members of this Society, have lately passed away. Both were master minds; and it would ill become me to venture to institute any comparison between them in respect of their intellectual calibre or the value of their work. If the one was perhaps more widely known to the world, his writings having been translated into many tongues, the other was at any rate more intimately known to us, seeing that he had the best of titles to rank as our founder or co-founder.1

Nevertheless, it will be legitimate, and also not without profit at the present time, to compare them in respect of. their theoretic interests and methods of research. I would try to prove that wisdom is justified of all her children, though interests be diverse and methods many. We must avoid narrowness of view. There is ever, for instance, a tendency at work among us to magnify some partial aspect of a subject at the expense of the rest. Or, again, it is a common and natural fallacy to suppose that we are initiating fundamental changes in the way of scientific procedure when we are but following up the clues provided by the

1 Gomme himself speaks of W. J. Thoms as "founder" (Folk-Lore, iii. 3), and Sir E. Brabrook repeats this, while calling Gomme "co-founder" (Folk-Lore, xiii. 12, 13); but Thoms himself seems to disclaim the honour (Folk-Lore Record, i. xiii). Thoms was, however, first "director," Gomme succeeding him in the office.

labour of a former generation. Thus it may be useful, as it is undoubtedly pious, to look backwards as well as forwards. -not to forget, lest we lose time in having to relearn.

In the first place, then, Tylor stood for anthropology and Gomme for folklore. With smaller men this might have been a cause of dissociation and cross purposes. Instead, both realized clearly from the outset that they were exploring the same field from opposite ends. Tylor led the way by introducing the term "survivals." 2 He applied it to "that great class of facts" constituted by "processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home." Here they "remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved." "The serious business of ancient society may be seen to sink into the sport of later generations, and its serious belief to linger on in nursery folk-lore." Let us, too, note in passing that Tylor was no adherent of that false psychology which treats a survival as mere inert matter, a waste product passively impeding the exercise of organic function. On the contrary, he was fully aware that "sometimes old thoughts and practices will burst out afresh, to the amazement of a world that thought them long since dead or dying"; in brief, that the survival may be quickened into a revival, the savage impulses having meanwhile but lain. dormant in the heart of the civilized man. So much then for Tylor's recognition of the study of survivals as a branch. of what he calls the science of culture.

2 See Primitive Culture (1st edit. 1871), 15 (pp. 16, 17 of 4th edit.) for his claim to this effect, as also for the passages subsequently cited; and see generally chaps. iii. and iv. He had already developed the notion of survivals as covering "the superstitious practices which belong to peasant folklore" in a lecture given at the Royal Institution, April 23, 1869, "On the Survival of Savage Thought in modern Civilisation"; see Proc. Roy. Inst. v. 522-35, esp. 530 (compare also ib. 534, on revivals).

Now folklore, as this Society has consistently conceived it, corresponds exactly to that branch of the science of culture which Tylor has here in view. It is true that, when William Thoms gave the word to the world in 1846, he was content to assign to his "good Saxon compound the broad and comfortable meaning of "the lore of the People." But already in the same year that saw the first general meeting of this Society Andrew Lang had roundly defined folklore as "the study of survivals." And not only in this respect does he conform to the Tylorian terminology, but likewise in describing the content of folklore as the "culture" that the people has created out of its own resources.5 If both he and the Council in its First Report prefer to decorate the word culture with inverted. commas, it was merely because in those days it was felt, as indeed there has been reason to feel more recently, that culture and barbarism do not naturally go together in our common speech or practice. For the rest, this First Report, drafted as we may plausibly conjecture by the hand of the secretary and chief organizer Gomme, indicates in the clearest language how it must always be the aim of our Society to combine folklore with the study of savagery in the interest of a single comprehensive science of culture. The statement of policy is so broad-minded that I make no apology for quoting it in a slightly abridged form. "Folklore may be said to include all the 'culture' of the people, which has not been worked into the official religion and history, but which is and has always been of self-growth. It represents itself in civilized history by strange and uncouth customs.... In savage life all these things are extant, not as survivals but as actual portions of the prevalent state of society. The Folk-lore survivals of civilization and the Folk-lore status of savage tribes both,

See his letter, Athenaeum, August 22, 1846, reprinted in the First Annual Report (1879), pp. 1-3 (appended to Folk-Lore Record, ii.).

Preface to Folk-Lore Record, ii. vii.

Folk-Lore Record, i. 99.