Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/47

 President ml Address. 15

Now folklore, as this Society has consistently conceived it, corresponds exactly to that branch of the science of culture which Tylor has here in view. It is true that, when William Thorns gave the word to the world in 1846, he was content to assign to his "good Saxon compound" the broad and comfortable meaning of "the lore of the People." ^ But already in the same year that saw the first general meeting of this Society Andrew Lang had roundly defined folklore as "the study of survivals."'* And not only in this respect does he conform to the Tylorian terminology, but likewise in describing the content of folk- lore as the " culture " that the people has created out of its own resources.-'' If both he and the Council in its First Report prefer to decorate the word culture with inverted commas, it was merely because in those days it was felt, as indeed there has been reason to feel more recently, that culture and barbarism do not naturally go together in our common speech or practice. For the rest, this First Report, drafted as we may plausibly conjecture by the hand of the secretary and chief organizer Gomme, indicates in the clearest language how it must always be the aim of our Society to combine folklore with the study of savagery in the interest of a single comprehensive science of culture. The statement of policy is so broad-minded that I make no apology for quoting it in a slightly abridged form. " Folk- lore may be said to include all the ' culture ' of the people, which has not been worked into the ofificial religion and history, but which is and has always been of self-growth. It represents itself in civilized history by strange and

uncouth customs In savage life all these things are

extant, not as survivals but as actual portions of the prevalent state of society. The Folk-lore survivals of civilization and the Folk-lore status of savage tribes both,

2 See his letter, Athcuaciint, August 22, 1S46, reprinted in the First Annual Report (1879), PP- 1-3 (appended to Folk-Lore Record, ii.).


 * Preface to Folk-Lore Record, ii. vii. ^ Folk-Lore Record, i. 99.