Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/65

 Rh modes of thought, European indeed, but of a relatively backward type. It is due to our neighbours across the channel to say that they first appreciated the scientific instruction capable of being conveyed by such objects. M. Sébillot's collection of Breton children's toys filled one of the most interesting cases at the Exhibition of Paris in 1889, and now forms part of the National Museum at the Trocadero. I hope that Professor Starr's generosity will keep us in mind how much we owe in anthropological matters to America, and bind us more closely in friendship to a nation of the same language, and mainly of the same stock and the same ideals as ourselves. Nor has his personal claim on our gratitude ended here. I have the pleasure of laying on the table a further gift in the shape of a copy of his beautiful Ethnological Album of the native races of Southern Mexico. It is intended for our library, where students making use of it will prize it as a witness to his energy and unselfish enthusiasm, as well as for its own intrinsic value.

I am not going to trouble you to-night with a review of folklore during the century now rapidly drawing to an end. Such reviews may be useful and appropriate; but it is equally appropriate and more immediately important to touch upon some current questions. If, however, we glance back for a moment at the past, we shall, I think, find nothing more remarkable in the history of the science of folklore than the change in the methods of record and study since the establishment of the Society twenty-two years ago. Then, folklore had hardly got out of the stage of dilettantism. People in general had only begun to perceive that the phenomena with which we are concerned were something more than curious, in spite of the writings of Sir Henry Maine, Maclennan and, most, important of all, Dr. Tylor. The term folklore, in fact, was confined to scraps of tradition; and anything like the conception of it we now hold was unknown. The Handbook of Folklore, issued by the Society in 1890, marks a