PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.
The Value of European Folklore in the History OF Culture.
This is, to the best of my belief, the first time,—at all events in the Old World,—that the duty of delivering the Annual Presidential Address to a learned Society has been entrusted to a woman. I am old-fashioned enough to feel considerable diffidence in occupying a position of so much responsibility, and one which has previously been filled by so many of greater note. But I regard the honour you have done me in placing me in this chair less as a compliment to myself individually, than as one to my sex in my person. I look on it as another pleasant token of the manner in which a generation brought up under the sovereignty of a woman has learnt to appreciate woman's help and counsel. So I am going to speak out frankly, knowing that whatever I may say will receive serious consideration at your hands.
Over thirty years,—the lifetime of a generation,—have elapsed since our Society was founded. The Report that is presented to you to-night is our thirty-second: one can hardly realise the different conditions that prevailed when we issued our first,—the different position then held by all anthropological study, and especially by studies bearing on Religion and Sociology. The patriarchal theory prevailed in Sociology, and the sun-myth, disease-of-language theory in the sphere of Mythology and Religion. We had
