PKE'^IDENTIAL ADDRESS SECTION E. II5 



the wide-sundered metiers of the philologist, necessarily compara- 

 tive, and the linguist, whether polyglot or idiomatist, are con- 

 fused. It is not realised that the philologist does not claim to 

 be an expert on every tongue as spoken, which indeed were quite 

 impossible, 'but can yet throw light, as perhaps no one else 

 can, on the meaning of the idioms within the family he studies, 

 and often far beyond ; for, once again, let us recall it, speech is 

 the key to the main gate of psychology. 



I may illustrate this failure to realise the position of the 

 philologist by the si;rprise and sometimes indignation I have met 

 with from the speaker of a dialect, whether European or native, 

 when one presumes to suggest a derivation for a personal or place 

 name. The non-philologist bystander, even of intelligence, is apt 

 to endorse the unfavourable verdict; but a concrete illustration 

 from an English place-name will shew the unreasonableness of 

 this attitude. I spent some years upon the Trent bank in the 

 combined parish of Kelham and Averham (pronounced A'erum), 

 near Newark. The spelling of both names suggested a home 

 originally; but of what? The Domesday " Calune " was rejected 

 as the mishearing of a Norman scribe, but a chronological listing 

 of the forms, in which the names occurred, revealed the fact 

 that 'the spelhng was a fallacy of association in both cases, and 

 phonetic script made plain that the local pronounciation preserved 

 the Anglo-Saxon locative phrase, all but exactly, which describes 

 the place as "set cellum and atherum " (gen plur : forms), i..e., 

 " at the springs and watercourses." The native Notts villager 

 had preserved the sotmd all those generations, but all his re])eti- 

 tions could not have guided him to the meaning of the name 

 without philology. As an Englishman born and bred, with no 

 trace, so far as I know, of foreign blood in me, I deeply regret 

 that this simple bit of English philology was due to a German 

 scholar, who very probably spoke bad English, and might rouse 

 our indignation or amusement at his temerity, if we did not 

 understand the use and purpose of the philologist, his distinc- 

 tion from the linguist, and his practical value, nevertheless, to 

 the same. Why need we be so behind in matters of such sim- 

 plicity? It reminds me of a certain front of a war where inter- 

 cepted enemy wireless messages were being passed to head- 

 quarters and uselessly filed, while the freely offered services of 

 an experienced decipherer were refused. 



May I venture to suggest that we see this same weakness 

 reflected in our own association, and even in Section E. Many 

 useful papers appear dealing with the customs of different tribes 

 or with their dialects, but how little comparative work is done 

 on the one or the other over any wide field. It may be thought 

 that this is due to the time not having yet arrived — but this is 

 not so, for the Berlin Orientalisches Seminar, and the Hamburg 

 Kolonial Institut (only recently at last followed by our London 

 school of Oriental languages), have long been working under 

 the guidance of ?\Ieinhof on the comparative study of Bantu, 



