Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/34

 22 Presidential Addi-ess.

takes this over ready-made from another branch of science. But this unequal state of tilings can assuredly be remedied, if we folklorists will only realize our opportunities. I am convinced that folklore, if developed along the right lines, can teach the anthropology of savages as much as the anthropology of savages can teach folklore. Let me try to show how this may be done.

Human nature, whether savage or civilized, is subject to perpetual transformation. This means that something is always disappearing while something else is coming into being. This law holds good of the most backward of societies no less than of the most advanced. It follows that survivals are no mere by-products of a latter-day civilization, but form an essential feature of human history taken at any of its successive stages and in any of its branching forms. The rate of change may vary according to the special conditions, but not the nature of the process. Transformism is the very nerve of histor}'. Nay, it is its very soul; since the continual give-and-take must not merely be construed objectively as loss and gain, but may be expressed with fuller significance in terms of will as rejection and selection.

Where, then, if not close at hand, within range of our personal experience, are we to look for a key to the movement of history? Surely transformism as it occurs palpably among our own folk will always mean more for us than as it looms obscurely in the reported doings of alien peoples. It seems to me that the folklorist still halts on the threshold of his real work. He has yet to enter into his kingdom. Let him have done with jottings. We ask of him not details as such, but rather a detailed account of the whole process of the transformation of culture as it takes place among the folk. Let him show us exactly how the new gains at the expense of the old, — how it partly readapts, partly diminishes and dwarfs, and partly destroys altogether. The sociology, and still more the psychology,