Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/54

 2 2 Presidential Address.

same spirit, I would ask you to consider the work of Gonimc, with special reference to his use of the historical method.

Gomme's views about method touch us very nearly, seeing that to introduce order and discipline into the researches of this Society was his heart's desire — nay, was probably" the prime incentive that moved him to work out those principles of method which were afterwards embodied in his own studies. From the time of our foundation onwards he was resolved that this Society should be no league of elegant triflers. We are collectors, it is true, rather than theorists in the first instance ; and your collector of folklore is born, not made. Nevertheless, even hounds of the right breed will lose themselves if there be no whipper-in. So it felTto Gomme, as secretary and director, to see that the work of the Society should advance along strictly scientific lines. I need not review in detail the steps that he took to this end — how, for instance, he provided us with a careful biblio- graphy of folklore, so that what the French would call our "documentation" might be thoroughly systematic. It is enough to say that he laboured to form our scientific methods, as did no other of our leaders with such conscious intent ; ^'* so that, indeed, we can scarcely fail to be sympathetic towards principles that are part, as it were, of our social inheritance.

Now, there is a sense in which a historical method is practicable for the folklorist in a way that it can never be for his brother the anthropologist. It is a sense differing alike from that in which we speak of the general method of the science of culture as the comparative or historical, and from the more restricted use of the term to signify the theory of historical connexion or transmission. In this, its third meaning, the historical method is one which by direct

^■*Thus in Folk-Lore, xiii. (1902), 13, Sir Edward Brabrook singles him out from among the protagonists of the Society for his contributions to the subject of method.