and Descent." 22 Gomme's special merit, however, consists in having formulated the principle of method that institutions need, first and foremost, to be studied in their local context. Intensive ethnographical research is the necessary prius of comparative ethnology. Before we proceed to trace historical connexions between different areas of culture on the strength of the geographical distribution of customs, we must have worked out the topographical distribution of customs within the several areas concerned, so as to make sure that in each case the things to be compared are themselves envisaged in the light of their authentic development. Such a method, then, as applied to a region with a recorded past such as this country, will be historical in two senses at once; because it is the only way of proving the historical transmission of customs, and at the same time because it involves the testing of each custom by its historical pedigree. It is likewise essentially sociological, since it insists that social organization rather than belief or story brings us directly into touch with that continuous life of the people of which the various customs are but the expression.

Further, such a method is no less characteristically ethnological. Even if we concentrate on a single area, we can hardly fail to discover, in its institutional history, the effects of culture-contact. We are proud to remember that under Gomme's Presidency this Society was to the fore in promoting an ethnological survey of Britain.23 Gomme's own work, too, had led him straight to the explanation of the British village-community in terms of culture-contact. Into the particular merits of this explanation we cannot go now; but it will serve as an excellent example of an ethnological hypothesis as employed by the historical method of folklore. Having tried to eliminate the effects

22 In Journ. Anth. Inst. xviii. (1888), 245 f.; see Gomme in Folk-Lore, ii. (1891), 487.

23 Compare Folk-Lore, v. (1894), 50.

of Roman and later influences, Gomme thought that he could resolve the village-community into a dual system due to the settlement of Aryan conquerors amid a preAryan population that was thereby reduced to serfdom. The grounds on which the theory was made to rest were primarily sociological. The Aryan overlords were credited with a tribal system that has left various survivals in the way of institutional custom or belief; whereas the aborigines were supposed to have already possessed a villageorganization which continued to exist in a modified form.24 When we are provided with so perfect a specimen of a theory of culture-contact, I need not labour the point that Gomme's favourite method was no less ethnological than it was sociological and historical in its purpose. Indeed I have said enough-or perhaps more than enough, seeing that I am speaking to those who knew him well-to justify the assertion that, just as we think naturally of Tylor in connexion with the evolutionary method, so the historical method ought to be for all time associated with the name of Gomme, who, while others groped, lit a lamp, and so lighted himself and the rest of us along a sure way.

I have now accomplished the main object of these remarks, which was to endeavour to do honour to the memory of Sir Edward Tylor and of Sir Laurence Gomme, by examining their work—very hastily and imperfectly I am afraid-from the limited but crucial standpoint of method. It remains to consider how we, who are left to carry on that work, may develop those pioneer methods of theirs in a way worthy of their approval, were they still here. There are active among us to-day eager advocates

24 Gomme has frequently expounded the theory in question. See, for instance, The Village Community (London, 1890), 137; Ethnology in Folklore (London, 1892), 70; Folklore as a Historical Science (London, 1908), 357; and Sociological Review (1909), 323.

of the ethnological method, such as Dr. Rivers and Professor Elliot Smith. On the other hand, the evolutionary school can claim adherents so powerful as Sir James Frazer and Mr. Hartland; while at Oxford, if only out of sheer loyalty to Tylor, some of us may always incline towards a psychological interpretation of primitive culture. Now how deep does the difference cut? Is there any need to prosecute science in the spirit of partisans? We have seen how Tylor and Gomme paid equal homage to both methods, though as anthropologist and as folklorist they severally applied a single and an opposite method to the work immediately confronting them. Has not the time come, then, when we may aspire to a joint use of the historical and the evolutionary methods? Logically they are not incompatible, but would rather seem to be complementary to each other. Cannot we make them practically so?

I venture to suggest, then, in the name of those masters of method, Tylor and Gomme, who realized that the paths to the truth are many but converging, that we bring our divided forces to bear on a theme that promises exercise for them all-I mean the psychology of culture-contact. I cannot, indeed, claim to have thought out in any detail how such a subject ought to be treated. Even had I done so, I could not attempt at this late hour to put my thoughts into words. But I hail it as a sign of the times that Dr. Rivers, whose passion for the strictest scientific method first led him to the study of social organization, and thenceforward to the study of ethnological intermixture, has tended more and more as he went on to eke out history by means of psychological considerations of a general nature. Being himself a psychologist of no mean repute, he was never, as some hot-heads would seem to be, for excluding psychology from the science of culture altogether. Yet for a long time he cried "to-morrow" to his poor handmaid, eager to serve. She must sit in the cold and wait. But somehow she has

slipped in and got to work; and it is plainly not in his heart any longer to wish it otherwise.

Going back for a moment to Gomme's ethnological work, we may note the same surreptitious ingress of a psychology that will not be denied. I take a couple of examples almost at hazard. Thus his theory of the origin of the village-community demands that the Aryan immigrants stand to the pre-Aryan aborigines in the relation of conquerors to conquered. Yet the former are assumed to have "adopted and adapted" certain beliefs of the indigenous population. Why? Because for religious reasons the invaders are apt to borrow from the local folk so as to make themselves at home among the sacred powers of the land.25 Now such a principle is to a certain extent susceptible of proof, or disproof, by the collection and comparison of historical instances. But in essence it is a psychological cause that is invoked, and one which, if genuine, must. have operated independently again and again. Once more, he puts forward a hypothesis which, though it is to be taken in close connexion with the other, rests on a psychological principle of another order, namely, one belonging to the psychology of sex. "It seems to me quite possible," he writes, "that the women of a conquered race, feared as they often were by their conquerors as the devotees of the local deities, might use that fear under some conditions to establish a place of power which has left its mark on the history of marriage." 26 Now here we have just the sort of problem concerning the effect of culture-contact on marriage-organization that Dr. Rivers has constantly to face in his "History of Melanesian Society." It may or may not be necessary in such a context to speculate on what might happen in virtue of the tendency to regard women as the mysterious sex. But I fail to see how we

In confirmation of such an explana

25 Compare Folk-Lore, iv. (1893), 13. tion, see E. S. Hartland in Folk-Lore, xxvii. (1916), 319. 26 Folk-Lore, ii. (1891), 494.

are ever to get at grips with such a question if psychological considerations are altogether ruled out on a priori grounds of method. Gomme at any rate was not such a pedant as to reject a useful hint, though it come from any quarter. Nor does Dr. Rivers show himself pedantic, inasmuch as he has passed on from sociology to ethnology, and from ethnology to psychology, with a progressive enlargement of outlook which makes his book a classic for all those who wish to study method in the making.

Dr. Rivers, indeed, allows in so many words that "there is one department of sociology in which... psychological assumptions become indispensable," namely, when the purpose is "to show how social institutions come into existence as the result of the contact and blending of peoples." 27 Such assumptions, however, he insists, are not to be treated as "laws." They must be tested by the study of social processes ere ever we can so regard them.28 With this we must all agree. After all, as folklorists and anthropologists, we are not interested in psychology or sociology as such, but in the science of human culture, a far more concrete and comprehensive study, which makes use of these disciplines, and of others as well, just in so far as they throw light on the subject of culture from this side or from that. Or again, we are not interested as ethnologists in the history of any particular culture-area in itself. A so-called "law" is no law, a demonstration of tendency is not a real demonstration, so long as it holds good only for the British Isles, or for Melanesia. Our science is concerned with the general conditions of culture-contact; and to this end, and to nothing short of it, must our sociological and psychological studies be conjointly directed.

Dr. Rivers is, of course, fully aware of this. Indeed, though his treatise on the history of Melanesian society has primarily an ethnographical scope, he has managed, in a few pregnant pages, to formulate such general conditions 27 Sociological Review, ix. (1916), 8.

28 lb. 9.