Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/10

2 who know more of folk-lore than I do, men who are as eager votaries in its cause as I am—and with such support I do not for an instant doubt that we may look to a successful year which shall stamp the Society as one of the hardest working of the learned bodies. This you must please accept as the key-note of my policy as President; so that by replacing a brilliant President by a working President, who could not be brilliant if he tried, and who is not going to try, you must expect from him only what the change implies—namely, work.

For there is so much to do—much to do, I mean, in a solid, practical way to convince a solid, practical kind of world. I will not weary you with a long catalogue of all there is to do; but I can at least indicate the main outlines of what appears to me to be absolutely necessary to our present position as a Society. I would arrange the several departments of our working organisation in somewhat the following manner:—

1. The bringing to light of all the hidden items of folk-lore contained in sermons, chronicles, local histories, old newspapers, parliamentary blue-books, legal records, criminal trials, etc. All this should be brought into the archives of the Society by first of all being reprinted in handy form in the exact words of the original, without note or comment. It forms our first platform.

2. The completion of the English bibliography of folk-lore, so that all books devoted to folk-lore subjects may be duly recorded in our archives and the particular subjects treated of by them placed before the student, would form our second platform.

3. The collection of all that remains yet uncollected in each county of the kingdom would form our third platform.

Then comes the sifting, arranging, and docketing of each separate folk-lore item brought together from these three sources, so that all its phases may be before the student—its earliest chronological mention, its most primitive forms, the changes of form in the secondary or later