Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/36

28 it is essential to accomplish a certain amount of dry work before we can get folk-lore fully recognised, as it should be, in the historical sciences. Folk-lore has suffered by being studied in piecemeal, because all attacks upon it have been directed against one or two of its regiments, which have been mistaken for its main army. Only the Society, in its collective capacity, can prepare for the student what he requires all along the line; the Society should always be scientific, let its individual members work as they may. Scientific methods may not be popular methods, but popularity is quite a secondary consideration. This has been the policy I have advocated ever since the Society has been in existence, and, while I have not lost one scrap of faith in the wisdom of such a policy, I have lost faith in my own capacity for successfully advocating it.

This brings me to speak here of our new Journal. I think the Society is to be congratulated upon the completion of the first volume of with such conspicuous success, and I think it owes a debt of gratitude to Mr. Nutt and Mr. Jacobs. But, in my opinion, the new Journal lacks something from the Society's point of view, and I only found what this something was in looking over the pages of the old. In an early volume of that work is a letter from Mr. Kinahan, which suggests the need of a place of record for the trifles which may come under the notice of an observer at all times and places, when but for a printed record it might be lost. Notes and Queries has long held this place; our Journal should now hold it. And for this to be accomplished we want a section of exclusively devoted to collection. I know there are pages devoted to notes, but we want, I think, a Collectors' Note-Book section definitely set out for those of our members who come across stray bits of folk-lore, whether printed in a non-folk-lore book or in tradition among the folk. With this properly organised, we might get members to search among the newspapers