giving a stimulus to researches of this sort, and not in North America only. If the vast compass of the domain of folk-lore has not been surveyed with adequate precision, it is owing to the very small number of special students in this field, a deficiency due to the scanty provision for anthropological study made by universities and learned institutions; this neglect is explained by the conventional character of the scholarship of the last generation, too much occupied with examination of the literary records to appreciate the equal importance of the direct contemplation of nature. On the whole, the pages of the Journal furnish evidence of continued increase in intelligence and ability, and greater exactness of research into early tradition.
With equal pleasure may be pointed out the useful character of the series of Memoirs of the Society, published since 1894. The first of these volumes continues to be the publication which casts more light than any other on the mental conditions of West African races, whose tales and superstitions were considered to be so closely connected with negro American folk-lore as to come within the scope of the operations of the Society. The second volume gave specimens of the curious mixture of dialect and traditional fiction which had grown up among French-speaking negroes of Louisiana; the third gave interesting examples of the folk-music of the same race,—a music which to the disgrace of American musical scholarship remains imperfectly collected and studied; the fourth, although intended to contain only one part of the material, constitutes the most considerable collection of English superstitions which has hitherto been published; the fifth, treating certain legends of the Navahoes, is universally accepted as one of the best tribal studies ever made, and as a most valuable model of ethnographic research in this field.
The truth of the doctrine, laid down in the announcement contained in the first number of the Journal of the Society, that humanity is a whole, the study of which is only rendered possible by records of every part of that whole, is daily becoming more evident in proportion as anthropologic method, which treats human societies and ideas as developments which seek their explanation in a comprehensive view embracing the lower as well as the higher divisions of the race, supersedes the methods of philosophic speculation, or of literary investigations content to obtain partial and inaccurate explanations from the literature or archeology of favored races.
On the other hand, if, in the course of the decade, there is much to be regarded with satisfaction, there is in the history of the Society much also which cannot be so considered. It is not creditable to American scholarship and intellectual activity that a society which
