Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/26

 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.

is tradition, the oral handing on of oral knowledge, that is the means by which the most of our folklore material has been, and is being, preserved. Tradition as a process deserves examination. We ought to know what are its conditions, its limits, its possibilities. Little has been done, as far as I know, to investigate these matters. They have been left vague. The Benthamite, content with citing Russian scandal, is wont to deny the possibility of accurate tradition at all. The credulous sentimentalist of the Bernard Burke kind will set no bounds to the process. It has been gravely argued that because one of the names of the star Seirios may be interpreted the traverser, there is in this title a remembrance of the time, more than thirty thousand years ago, when Seirios was crossing the Milky Way; which (as Euclid would say) is absurd. And yet there are materials for the more accurate determination of the scope of oral tradition, as I hope to show by certain examples.

Now it is first to be noted that in many unlettered, that is, in my sense, bookless, communities, there are special means, pieces of social machinery, devised and practical for the preservation of the knowledge of the events and culture of the past. What Cæsar tells us about the Druid school of the Gauls in his day is but an earlier description of what Dr. Hyde and Dr. Joyce tell us, from mediæval Irish MSS., about the schools of ancient and mediæval Erin. Says