Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/62

 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.

delivery of a Presidential Address has now become a custom so firmly established in this as in other scientific societies that it is not lightly to be broken through, otherwise I confess I should have shrunk from a task which I feel to be one of the most onerous and difficult falling to a President's lot. In some societies the President is expected to give a sort of funeral oration on all the members who have passed away during the year. That is not a cheerful undertaking, even though sweetened with all the spices of the embalmers. In some societies the President is expected to dilate on the position and prospects of the organisation: a function performed for us by the Annual Report of the Council. We have been wont to leave the President a wider discretion: he may talk at large with impunity; and if this result in his airing his own hobbies the members are generous enough to forgive him, and to make allowance for the occasion when they are most indifferent to the subject. The hope of this indulgence is my excuse, albeit a lame one, for the observations I am about to address to you. Fragmentary they needs must be, from the nature of the subject I have chosen. Yet I hope at least they may be helpful, though in ever so feeble a measure, to some who are interested in the problems confronting the student of folklore.

But, first of all, though I do not propose to detail the losses inflicted upon the Society by death during the year, one of them is of no ordinary kind and not to be passed by in silence. I refer to the death of Dr. Brinton. He was not an old man. Indeed many more years of activity might have been anticipated for him. But measured by the extent and variety of his works, and by the influence he wielded in anthropological science, especially in his native country,