Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/24



excellent friends and fellow labourers, the members of the Society of Anthropology of Paris, who have lately been so genial and kindly in their expressions of goodwill to this Society, and its sister Society the Anthropological Institute, change their President annually, and take the opportunity of getting two addresses, one from the retiring President and one from the new one. I mention this because I find that in the address which my friend Dr. Chervin delivered last January, when he ascended the fauteuil de la Présidence that he has filled with so much distinction, he used words with regard to his Society which I desire to adopt as fitly expressing my own opinions with regard to the Folk-Lore Society. He said: "We recruit our adherents from the four cardinal points of the scientific horizon. The very diversity of our origins, of our professions, of our education contributes powerfully to our strength, for the smallest fact is examined by each of us with his personal pre-occupations for the greatest benefit of all. It appears to me that we are a veritable Society of Mutual Help—a Friendly Society—applied to scientific researches." When I read this I derived some much-needed light on the problem how it came to be in the contemplation of my brethren of the Council and of the last General Meeting that there could be any fitness of things in my elevation to this chair. I assure you that I have risen to address you under an oppressive sense of the greatness of my predecessors.

I do not specially refer to those noble Earls—Verulam, Beauchamp, and Strafford—who were influenced by our founder and first director, Mr. W. J. Thoms, when he was deputy librarian of the House of Lords, to honour us with the patronage of their historic names in the first few years