Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/51

 WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 17th, 1894.

ANNUAL MEETING.

The (Mr. G. Laurence Gomme, F.S.A.), in the chair.

The minutes of the last Annual Meeting were read and confirmed.

On the motion of the Chairman, seconded by Dr. Gaster. it was resolved that the Annual Report (printed infra) be received and adopted.

On the motion of Mr. Nutt, seconded by Mr. Jacobs, it was resolved that the Balance-Sheet appended to the Report be also adopted.

The President, Vice-President, Members of Council, and Officers of the Society for the ensuing year, were duly elected.

The President delivered his Annual Address (infra, pp. 43-69), and a short discussion ensued, in which Dr. Gaster and Mr. Nutt took part.

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.

"There is nothing new under the sun." The Council has not even recommended for your selection a new President, and as it thus falls to my lot to once more address you from this chair, I must perforce discuss some old problems, perhaps with an iteration which you may not quite appreciate, but, at all events, with a purpose that is all-important to our science.

It is one of the fundamental laws of that science that man, until he has reached the academic stage of culture, never invents a new thing: new things develop gradually from old things, but new things are not created by man—not new arts, new customs, new legends, new beliefs, nor new fairy tales. As an old Bechuana chief said to a French