Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/230

218 so strongly insists. No society stands still, no society is in a watertight compartment, it moves and is acted upon from without as well as within, just because it is living. And it is that life that we must seize and understand.

Taking this view of folk-lore and the science of survivals he was able to grasp the true significance of the work of both Tylor and Gomme, which might have been so easily misconceived and misrepresented—placed in opposition to one another rather than in apposition—and was able to show how each was complementary to the other, and to plead for their recognition in union as a combination necessary for the advance of the study their lives were given to promote. This thought animated all these addresses and is, in fact, his chief contribution to the social side of anthropology. It enables him to stride victoriously over the whole field, where a narrower view might have led us, if not him, to disaster at this crisis.

Details may be open to criticism. The opposition, for in- stance, suggested between "the old and the merely old-fashioned" on his own principles does not exist. If the old-fashioned be not "typologically primitive," it is merely a question of time; the antiquated speedily and insensibly becomes the archaic. But such criticisms are perhaps quibbles. We need not dwell on them: they detract nothing from the debt we owe him. The other essays—the reviews of The Golden Bough and Folklore in the Old Testament, and the remaining articles and addresses—even when they seem least relevant, are all germane to the theme and carry on the main contention. The plea for a larger and more liberal provision for the teaching of anthropology with which he winds up sums the need for a deeper and wider study of the science, both for theoretical and practical purposes. A nation whose political and commercial interests cover all continents and are bound up with islands of every sea cannot afford to be outstripped in its studies of mankind by peoples whose practical needs are confined within a smaller area, whose responsibilities are fewer and less insistent than ours.