Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/28

 14 our Society has been the first to discover its significance and to realise the poetry of the submerged. The late Mr. Thoms and a few other enthusiastic students of folk tales and superstitions, customs, and games banded themselves together in the year 1878 for the purpose of collecting and preserving the fast-perishing relics of the lore or knowledge possessed by the people, and the treasures of unwritten traditions, practices, and customs. To their appeal a few more answered readily, and for thirty years our Society has been able to show an unbroken record of work admirably conceived and successfully carried out. It was the first attempt to take Cinderella away from the hearth and from the ash-heap to which she had been relegated by her ignorant and spiteful sisters. This Society has given a powerful impetus to the scientific treatment of those crude philosophies which are embodied in Folklore.

With the deepening of these studies the basis has broadened. The true import of men and events and the fitting place to be assigned to them in the mechanism and fabric of science and history are found only by comparing one with the other. Through such comparison out of the experimental stage of mere collection grows up the historical appreciation and scientific understanding of the facts thus collected. The Folk-Lore Society has also proceeded from the one stage to the other. It is not merely a society for collecting customs and relics which our so-called modern education is fast obliterating by driving away the poetry from school and from home, but it has made the science of Folklore possible by a sustained comparison between the legends and tales, customs, and superstitions prevailing in one country with those prevailing in other countries. The example set by the Folk-Lore Society has been followed abroad, and has given rise to similar societies with kindred objects, working with us in the same spirit and towards the same