Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/28

 16 of collecting isolated facts which it was incumbent upon us to undertake at the outset of our career, not the arrangement and co-ordination of recorded material to which our efforts are now specially directed. Our annual collection of papers announces itself as "a Review of Myth, Tradition, Institution, and Custom," a programme which sufficiently describes the present scheme of our work. In our early days we had some misgivings whether our objects and methods were really scientific. These doubts have long ago been dispelled. While much of our attention is concentrated on the problems of Comparative Religion, in that sense of the term which implies a survey of the beliefs of backward races throughout the world in relation to those surviving among the less cultured classes in our own and other civilised communities, our work has come to be regarded by general consent as truly scientific, and commends itself to the ever-increasing attention of all thinking men. Our first duty obviously was to collect the popular beliefs, cults, institutions, and customs which survive in this country. To secure this, one of the primary objects of our incorporation, we are engaged, besides other special work, on the compilation of a series of volumes of County Folklore, in which the material scattered through a wide and often fugitive literature will find permanent record. For eight English counties this work is now complete; in others, including parts of Scotland and Ireland, it is in active progress. As a further step in this direction, we are about to issue, for the guidance of collectors, a comprehensive Handbook, which we owe to the learning and literary skill of Miss C. S. Burne, assisted by experts in various branches of the subject. A still more ambitious scheme, now in progress under the charge of Mr. H. B. Wheatley, is a new edition of the classical work on British folklore, the Observations on Popular Antiquities by John Brand. We may expect that our new edition of this work will fully represent the great advance of knowledge since