Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/89

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FASCINATING volume for all students of folk-lore is the Official Report of the Second International Congress. This is not the place to discuss the uses of a Congress; and, indeed, when one of the results is the production of a volume of nearly 500 pages, raising so many questions of interest, opening so many avenues of scientific speculation, heaping together so many new facts, and containing so many hints towards the solution of the problems that already confront us, we hardly pause to ask what are the uses of a Congress. Students of folk-tales will turn, of course, to the Folk-tale Section. But the importance of the Report to them does not stop there. M. Ploix's article on Le Mythe de l'Odyssée seems to have lost its way in the Mythological Section. Mr. Hindes Groome's paper on The Influence of the Gipsies in the Institution and Custom Section, and Mr. Hugh Nevill's Sinhalese Folk-lore in the General Theory and Classification Section, also overlap our own. We can now see how fierce the battle between the Anthropologists and the Disseminationists waxed; and, sitting down quietly with the book in hand, we can measure