Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/423

 Whatever their judgment on this theory, students may be grateful to Mr. Field for bringing to the surface both ilie cuckoo myth and the Cuckoo Pens. There are many variants of the myth, which is of course widespread. Sometimes it is an owl which is penned (Holt, Norfolk), or a crow (Cornwall), or a dab-chick (Sussex). And "Cuckoo Pen," or some variant, is a far more common field- name than the author seems to think. In Staffordshire, for instance, it is found as " Cuckoo Cage " and " Cuckoo Corner," and a perusal of Tithe scheilules would probably show that most parishes possess it. However, this is a matter for local research. Mean- while the general reader will find in this book a detailed survey of many of the old roads, dykes, and earthworks of Berks and Bucks, and a discussion of their bearing upon the course of the English invasion campaigns. Mr. Field has certainly been successful in presenting, in an attractive fLishion, the historical and antiquarian interest of a district which he evidently knows at first hand. And as dealing with a problem in field-nomenclature the book deserves attention.

S. A. H. BURNK.

Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore. By Eliz.-vueth M.arv Wright. Oxford: University Press. 1913. Pp. xx-f342.

Philology, in the reaction from the higli hopes that, thirty or forty years ago, were entertained of it as a key to ethnology, mythology, and tradition, attracts just now less attention than is its due. This is especially the case with the study of the English language. It does not appear that Mrs. ^^'right's object in the work before us was to exhibit the true relations between language and folk-lore, yet she succeeds in doing so in a really remarkable way. She first gives a chapter on Dialect-speakers ("the folk"). Then follow ten chapters devoted to Dialects, and ten to the Folk- lore embodied in dialect. Thus she exhibits Language as the form which clothes Thought, and as the vehicle of expression of Thought. She shows us what subjects the people think of and what they think about them. The popular opinion that the peasantry of Great Britain have a very limited vocabulary is not yet extinct,