Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/126

120 much that is of importance with regard to the ideas and pursuits of the old Teutonic world may be gathered by students of folk-lore.

With Band ii, Lieferung 1, we are more immediately engaged; H. Schuck contributes a history of the Swedish and Danish literature which, passing over without due notice the earlier traditions and traditional history, deals briefly but clearly with the mediæval remains of Sweden and Denmark, and appends a useful selected bibliography. R. Kögel’s Old High and Old Low German literature is fuller and more detailed, dealing one by one with the various texts, prose and verse, Latin and Teutonic, giving a good choice of references, and forming the most practical introduction to the subject yet printed. The English student will find it of special service for the comparison with and illustration of the parallel Old and Early English remains. F. Vogt begins his sketch of the Middle High-German literature in the same fasciculus on a similar plan

In Acta Germanica we have a new series projected by R. Henning and J. Hoffory; it is intended to place the results of scientific philology (in the widest sense) before a somewhat wider public than has been hitherto catered for—a most praiseworthy design. The need for some such endeavour is almost more necessary on the Continent than it is here, for the differentiation of function, fostered no doubt by endowed special research, has rather brought about a neglect of efforts to improve the general culture of the public that reads; Hackel’s fascinating books belonging to a rare class in Germany, while in this country books such as Galton’s important contributions to biology are eminently readable.

The series opens with M. Hirschfeld’s Untersuchungen zur Loka-Senna, containing a normalised and Sieverian text and a good translation, preceded by an introduction