Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/280

244 Saineau in his work on Roumanian Fairy Tales (pp. 856-69). If Mr. Aarne had extended his investigation beyond the narrower cycle of the tale of the Magical Gifts, and had taken into consideration the large amount of material available for the comparative study of the cycle, he might have hesitated to draw a hasty conclusion from insufficient material. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the work of compiling and comparing these tales among themselves has been satisfactorily done by Mr. Aarne, which makes this monograph a valuable contribution to the comparative study of folk-tales. .

author of these latest volumes of the well-known French series seems to be a very careful student of his district, for, besides these two volumes on the fauna and flora (respectively), he has written five other works upon Franche-Comté. Moreover, he would seem to be an observer at first hand, for, whereas he acknowledges obligations to so large a number of friends who have aided him for many years that the list would be "too long to publish," on the other hand he appears to have consulted but nine published works, of which seven are dictionaries and vocabularies of local dialect.

Popular names, dialect words, and dialect proverbs constitute so large a part of the work that, though of extreme interest to the student of French patois, the books would not lend themselves well to translation. They are, however, worthy of a place as books of reference in any folklore library. The arrangement is alphabetical, and there is, moreover, in each volume, an excellent index of unfamiliar terms.

From the folklore point of view the volume on the fauna of the district is the more interesting, perhaps for a reason to which the author refers in the preface, and with which most of us are