Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/30

 16 the village children for performance at one of these entertainments, and the result was a great success. Mrs. Gomme, hearing of this from me, took up the idea with characteristic energy, trained a party of children at Barnes (teaching them games from other places in addition to those they already knew), overcame the anxieties of the Committee of the Congress, who sent a solemn deputation down to Barnes to inspect and report on her doings, and, finally, when the games were performed at the conversazione, she had the success of the Congress. Following it up, she compiled the Dictionary of British Traditional Games, which must always rank beside Strutt's Sports and Pastimes as a standard work on the subject with which they both deal. How the revival of traditional games and dances has progressed since its appearance we all know.

Perhaps nothing has done more to bring home to us the reality and importance of the phenomenon of "Survival in Culture" than have that little Handbook and those childish games. It is pleasant to reflect that these two foundation-stones were laid by a man and a woman working in partnership, a husband and wife, the founders of our Society, Mr. and Mrs. G. Laurence Gomme.

In the twenty years that have passed since then, the claims of the early history of culture on the attention of anthropologists have gained general recognition, and the study has advanced all along the line. The older Universities have taken it up, each more suo. Cambridge, the scientific, has sent out exploring expeditions commissioned to report not only on physical anthropology and technology, but on the "manners and customs of the natives," chronicled with a thoroughness and exactitude never attempted before. The whole standard of scientific research in the fields of ethnology and culture has been raised by the work of the Cambridge explorers. Oxford, the philosophic, approached the study of culture from the side