Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/229

 Reviews. 207

It may be that this is to criticise the book too exclusively from a scientific point of view. That is the business of a reviewer in a scientific periodical. I believe Mrs. Martin has real gifts of observa- tion and sympathy with the natives. If she will continue her study of them, make herself acquainted with some elementary anthro- pology, and take Notes and Queries on Anthropology in her hand, she may yet give us what is greatly needed — a detailed and accurate account of the Basuto, their civilisation and their ideas, before these are obliterated by the missionary and the trader.

E. Sidney Hartland.

Short Notices.

Vowel Soimds of East Yorkshire Folk Speech. By the Rev. M. C.

Morris, B.C.L., M.A. 1901. Henry Froude. is. Lakeland Words. By B. Kirby. Edited by Professor G. Wright,

1898. Kendal. T. Wilson, Highgate. 2s. 6d. Letters and Poems. By Nathan Hogg. Edited by R. Dymond,

F.S.A. Exeter : Drayton and Sons. 3s. Wit and Wisdom of the South Lancashire Dialect. Collected by

F. E. Taylor. 1901. Manchester: John Heywood. Proverb Lore. By F. Edward Hulme, F.S.A. 8vo. pp. viii.,

270. 1902. Elliot Stock.

The first two books noted above are careful studies in local dialects and terms of speech, valuable rather to the philologist than to the folklorist. And although there is a witch-story on p. 49 of Nathan Hogg's Poems., and some scattered references to folk-beliefs occur in his pages, their chief interest, apart from the language, is rather personal than popular.

But in Wit and IVisdom there are many things besides philology. The book is divided into comparisons and proverbs, quaint and personal sayings, with a few folk-rhymes at the end. Proverbs tell us what the folk really are, better than any other class of folklore, and in these 1,001 sayings are mirrored the homely philosophy and shrewd judgment so characteristic of the Lancashire people. There is a good-humoured cynicism running through the whole, which makes for placidity, though it may not lead to high ideals