Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/39

 Rh to the Folk-lore Society. To keep all this before the public is, let us frankly admit, the object of the congress. We also want to see each other's faces as we read each other's works, and to enjoy some personal discussion of matters in which there is much diversity of opinion. Probably we shall squabble; I hope we shall do so with humour and good humour. There may be solar mythologists here, or persons who believe in the white Archaian races, who gave their rosy daughters, and with them laws, to black, red, brown, and yellow peoples. These views do not recommend themselves to my own reasoning faculties; my notions do not recommend themselves to the solar mythologists and the Archaian whites, but that is no reason why we should not discuss them in a friendly spirit, and take a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne. A congress has a perfect right to any social enjoyments within its reach, and if any one can sing folk-songs, or dance the beggar's dance to please us, like Paupakeewis in Hiawatha, I trust that the opportunity and the desire to oblige may not be absent. There is no use in confounding each other for our theories of customs or myths, and, in the acerbity of their bickers, our fathers, the old antiquarians, taught us what to avoid.

After these few prefatory remarks on the purpose of the congress I may endeavour to explain what we mean or, at all events, what I mean, by Folk-lore. When the word was first introduced, by Mr. Thoms, it meant little, perhaps, but the observing and recording of various superstitions, stories, customs, proverbs, songs, fables, and so forth. But the science has gradually increased its scope, till it has, taken almost all human life for its province. Indeed if any one asks how and where Folk-lore differs from anthropology, I am rather at a loss for a reply. When antiquarians such as our own old Aubrey began to examine rural usages and superstitions, like the maypole and the harvest home, they saw—they could hardly help seeing—that the practices of the folk, of the peasant class everywhere, were