great honours upon him, and gave him his title. Now, Miss Dempster asked, was the historical element the peg to hang these wild legends on? All these stories, she contended, were much older; they had some far distant root. According to the German saying, "es liegt ein tiefer Sinn im kind'schen Spiel"; did they not think it possible that there was a higher ground even than history for these stories, that their real root was in the human emotions, in the love of wonder, in the fear of deliverance, in the necessity of the human creature to ally himself with the divine? There had been an allusion to Cupid. That underlied the history of the relation of the sexes, the perpetual mystery. He always came to us as a tree, or a lizard, or something wonderful. Those emotions seemed to her to betray the wish to believe that we are in some way strange beings, and closely related to the beast, the tree, the flower, and the powers of nature. People would always wish to be delivered; they had their hope everywhere, and that would last until there was no more sea.
Mr. Oswald thought that Mr. Stuart-Glennie's illustration of the child's notion of the dog and the bear was a capital mistake: a child knowing a dog, but not knowing a bear, being more apt to exclaim that it had seen a big brown dog when really seeing a bear, than vice versâ. To this Mr. Glennie retorted that the child knew the bear from the picture-books, and that the child's mind being predisposed to exaggerate, he must maintain that his illustration held perfectly good. The incident he had described had actually happened with his own dog.
Mr. Gomme was in doubt whether the historical people to which Mr. MacRitchie had drawn attention were the historical people of fifty or a hundred years ago, or the historical people which we called primitive. He had noticed in the book to which the lecturer had referred, that he started with the consideration of the historical people of fifty or a hundred years ago, and then gradually went back to the prehistoric houses, and one was at a loss to know whether he based his arguments on the aboriginal people or on the people of a hundred years ago. If enlightened on this point, they would be better able to test the theory before them on something like scientific ground. He agreed with the theory when applied to the conditions of the prehistoric race, but he found himself stopped when he applied the same argument to the people of only a century ago.
The Rev. W. S. Lach-Szyrma said, in his studies of folk-lore he had noticed that scenes of horror dwelt more upon the mind than scenes of joy. He had tried to get some traditions of the battle of Sedgemoor in Somerset, and he found them to be very different from those chronicled by history. A child would remember certain things which seemed unimportant to a grown-up person, and thus the child's
