Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/38

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26
Presidential Address.

received from her the detailed description which will enable us to illustrate it as it deserves, but I hope that in time we may be able to produce such a record of it as may rank worthily with Professor Starr's Catalogue of his Mexican collections.

The publication by the Society during the year of Dr. R. C. Maclagan's Games and Diversions of Argyleshire adds a great quantity of valuable material to the accumulation of facts upon which we base our generalisations, and affords an excellent model of the manner in which such work should be done.

Among the events of the year which most strongly affect the student of folklore, I count the death of Léon Marillier. From a touching notice in the Revue de l'Histoire des Religions (xliv., 167), by M. Jean Réville, who was his colleague in the direction of that review, it appears that on the 22nd August he was returning to Trequier with his wife and her young sister in a vessel which suddenly capsized in sight of land. The ladies perished the same day. Marillier, who could not swim, was thrown by the current on the rocks in an exhausted condition, which resulted in an attack of congestion of the lungs and of pleurisy, from which he died in Paris on the 15th October, at the early age of 38. Though not a Protestant, he had commenced his public career as teacher in the faculty of Protestant theology at Paris, a circumstance which M. Réville rightly thinks to be honourable both to the largeness of mind of that faculty and to the perfect independence of thought of the young professor. In 1887-88 he lectured on psychology in its relations with religion; in 1888-89 on religious phenomena and their psychological basis; and in the following year on the religions of uncivilised peoples.

By his articles contributed to the Revue in question, his memoir on the survival of the soul and the idea of justice among uncivilised peoples in the Report of the École des Hautes Études for 1893-94, and his preface to the trans-