Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/104

80 and I should be very glad of a reference to any member of your Society who may be able to help me to meet vith a living representative of the art, which has been practised there since 1660, and probably from a century earlier.


 * 6, De Vesci Terrace, Kingstown,
 * Co. Dublin.

[Mr. Barrett might write to F. T. Elworthy, Esq., Foxdown, Wellington, Somerset, or to W. Bidgood, Esq., Curator, Museum, Taunton. Either of these gentlemen would probably be able to help him. — ] __________

(Vol. viii. p. 272.) The utter misrepresentations of my theories of the origins of Civilisation, of Matriarchy, &c., in the review of Greek Folk-Poesy in your September issue could have been duly exposed only in such a recapitulation of these theories as you have declined to insert, though it would have run to but four pages. I shall, therefore, only note with reference to my theory of the origin of Amazonian Matriarchy that the line of remark is followed which, with the single exception of a brief notice by Mr. Nutt, has for years past been taken in Folk-Lore — and really now ad nauseam — since Mr. Gomme, with reference to that theory and myself personally, asserted (Folk-Lore, December, 1891) that "he bases his researches on brilliant suggestions coupled with an intense belief in the validity of his arguments, without the necessity of providing proofs." And I think that I am entitled to be allowed at least to point to the facts which contradict the latest of such statements in my reviewer's various observations on "the scantiness of the facts on which I rely," &c. It was in a paper read in April, 1887, before the Royal Historical Society, that I first made my suggestion as to the possible ethnological explanation of Matriarchy. In order to verify it, I took up the special problem of Amazonian Matriarchy. First, I urged Miss Garnett to do what had not yet been done, namely, to make a representatively complete collection of the folklore of all the various races now under Turkish sway in the old Amazonian