Ladies and Gentlemen.-I need hardly tell you that I have not come to introduce Dr. Westermarck to you. He needs no introduction to the Sociological Society, nor indeed to any learned society in England. We are proud to have a foreign scholar of his eminence domiciled among us, teaching in. London and writing his books in the English language. I am here simply because your Society has done me the honour to invite me to take the chair this evening. I accepted the invitation as an honour, and I

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... nk you for it. I accepted the invitation all the more gladly because it gives me an opportunity of testifying to the high esteem in which I hold the work of my friend Dr. Westermarck. Dr. Westennarck is a very remarkable man. In some respects I think he is unique. He combines many activities. In the first place he is a teacher teaching in two of the capitals of Europe. In Helsingfors, the capital of his native Finland, he has created a school of anthropology and sociology which bids fair to. extend and enrich these new studies. Three of his pupils are now at work investigating the institutions of savages at points so remote from each other as New Guinea, Bolivia and Siberia. So far as I have examined the writings of Dr. Westermarck's scholars they seem to me to be marked by the qualities which eminently distinguish their master: I mean teaming and sobriety, two qualities which, I am sorry to say, are by no means always united in the same person. Some years ago, when Finland was in the throes of an acute political crisis, when the political liberty of the country was seriously threatened, I received from Finland two disaertations written by two pupils of Dr. Westermarck in the English language and dealing with abstract points of primitive religion. I thought it a remarkable testimony to the mental powers and to the firmness of character of the Finnish people that at a most anxious time when their thoughts must have been so much occupied with national questions of the deepest prMticat impottaiKX, there should yet be found among them students who could pursue their researches undisturbed by the anxieties and fears which every one in Finland must then have felt. It reminded me of the encouragement which Milton drew from similar circumatances when our own country was passing through oae of the gravest criaea im its history. He tells us that when England in his time was distracted with civil war, when the whole country was what he called a shop of arms, there were still students sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving tlew notions and ideas, and he hoped great things from a nation so pliant aad so prone to