Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/57

 Presidential Address. 25

nothing to do with the evolutionary theor}\ On the con- trar}', he rebukes Mr. Jacobs, when the latter pours scorn on those he nicknamed the casuaHsts, as one " who is per- petually forgetting his masters in the science," and reminds him of "a man called Tylor." ^" Gommc's own position in respect to the theory of independent origins is eminently reasonable. He is prepared to make the assumption in certain cases, but does so "provisionally," just as Tylor did also.-'' One cause, he says, with which the tolklorist must, alvva}-s reckon is " the generation of the same thought by 1 people of the same mental development, wherever they 1 may be existing, or at whatever date." -^ The evolutionary \ principle could not be more fairly stated.

Nevertheless, Gomme put most of his strength into the exposition and advocacy of the complementary method — ■ the historical, sociological, ethnological. He gave it emphasis, because it needed it. In those early days the interest in belief and story had outrun the interest in insti- tutions ; though it is true that the Folk-Lore Congress of 1 89 1 had impartially allotted sections to each of these three departments of the subject. Gomme's researches into the history of the village-community in this country had taught him betimes the value of referring oddments v.-'^ of custom to their institutional basis, as established by exhaustive enquiry within a particular area of culture. So, injtbe course of several Presidential Addresses delivered in \/ the early nineties, and elsewhere, he developed, for the lasting benefit of this Society and of our science in general, his conception of the fundamental importance of the study of institutions, or, as he otherwise phrases it, of social organization. Even as regards this kind of method he gracefully concedes the lead to Tylor, referring more especially to his essay " On a Method of investigating the development of Institutions applied to Laws of Marriage

^^ Folk-Lore, iv. (1S9J), 13.

"-''lb. 14. '^ I!>. 10.