indicate. In any case it is essential that our terminology should be as precise as possible.
Many folklorists pay almost as much attention to the facts of ethnology as to vestiges of older cultures in a civilised community, and not without reason, as from these data they hope to find an explanation of the vestiges, Our own excellent Handbook of Folklore (1914) is as much a textbook on certain aspects of ethnology as it is of folklore. It is also for this reason that the Society is justified in publishing papers on the manners and customs of primitive and backward peoples which might equally appropriately be published in journals devoted to ethnology. Such investigations are the comparative data which in certain cases may or may not prove to be necessary for the elucidation of the manners and customs of our remote ancestors. From this point of view they would have been welcomed by the founders of our science, but these probably would have regarded them as being purely ethnological data, since they recognised a clear-cut difference between ethnology and folklore. I think that at the present time there is a tendency to regard these two subjects as practically synonymous; if that be so there will be a danger of folklore proper being swamped by ethnology. I would like to insist that while folklorists may and should employ all the ethnological data that can be of service to them they should never lose sight of the fact that folklore is a definite line of enquiry, and that they should jealously preserve the claim that has been pegged out for them.
I now turn to the record of our Society, and when we look at the length of some ten feet which the bound volumes take up on the bookshelf we cannot but feel gratified at the amount which has been accomplished during the past years. Broadly speaking, the energies of our members and contributors have been directed along several main channels.
First and foremost I place the recorders of folklore in
