Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/120

106 India upon the ancient world requires to be dealt with as a whole by some competent scholar. Meanwhile, Dr. van Eysinga's thoughtful and judicious essay and his collection of parallels will be appreciated by all who are interested in the problems of storyology, quite as much as by theologians.

notes, contributed by Mr. Bladen to the North Staffordshire Field Club, and reprinted from their Transactions, are a sample of what may be done by local inquiry to save the rapidly vanishing folklore of the English counties. Naturally they include a good deal that is common to many counties, if not to all England. But they are hardly the less valuable for that, since one of the most important questions to be determined in a country which has been occupied by so many different peoples as ours, is, what are the geographical limits of the different items of belief and practice. As a criterion of race, evidence from folklore is probably to be received with caution, but at all events it will help to show to what extent the folk has been penetrated by the successive cultures.

Mr. Bladen begins his collection with the legend of St. Wulfad and St. Rufin, the scene of whose murder is laid near Stone: but neither he nor Mr. Poole in his Staffordshire Folklore (a poor performance reprinted from the Wolverhampton Chronicle) gives any authority for the legend, for which I have searched several old chroniclers in vain. I would warn local collectors generally against this too common error. It is a grave omission. And let me further beg them not to speculate on the origins of the customs and superstitions they may find, but to content themselves with simply recording them. Even those who have made the longest and most earnest study of the subject are often led astray on the question of origins: it is no wonder therefore if others err when they derive the throwing of old shoes after a newly-wedded pair from the Mosaic law, or ascribe the practices of All Fools' Day to