Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/448

 428 Correspondence.

On resuming the session at 2 p.m. the first half-hour or so was taken up by Dr. Azoulay's lecture on the phonography of folktales and songs, exemplified on a phonograph. Through its instru- mentality we were enabled to listen to songs and stories in the Bearnais and other French dialects, in Armenian, Basque, Tibetan, Chinese, Uzbeg Turkish, and Hungarian. The latter were selected from a larger number of folk-songs from the collection of M. Vikar, who was not present at the Congress, but had intended giving a full demonstration of Hungarian songs and music on the phonograph. Some of these I probably heard last summer in M. Vikar's house at Budapest. Though the phonograph is not a very cheerful instrument to listen to. Dr. Azoulay made the most of it, and his lecture, which was delivered orally, was loudly applauded.

Although unable to give an abstract of the more striking papers laid before the Congress, it will not be inopportune to give a list of them, thirty-three in all. From the titles alone the general object of the communications may be learnt. From them we can form an idea of the particular branches of folklore that most attract our fellow-workers on the other side of the Channel, and can observe the trend of their investigations and of their sympa- thies in this or that direction. On the whole it would seem that the folktale, legends, folk-music, and the literary side of folklore is what attracts most attention. Papers on rites, usages, customs, and the more anthropological aspect of folklore played a very small part in the last international Congress of the century. The contrast between these two aspects of folklore lies in this, that one deals with ideas that are put into words, the other with ideas that are translated into actions. Among papers of the latter description I ought not to pass over an excellent lecture on " Amulets " by M. de Mortillet, accompanied by an exhibition of many specimens collected by himself. Quite new ground was broken by M. Th. Volkov in an interesting paper, " The Science of the Unlettered Classes in general and more particularly in Ukrain." Among other matters he described how the Russian peasants multiply, add, and subtract larger sums, and how they perform simple geometrical operations when the area of a plot of ground has to be measured.

The following is a list of the papers that will appear when the Proceedings of the Congress are published.