Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/260

250 influence of the new industrial system and of immigration to America and Germany. Vol. III. is the autobiography (with critical treatment) of an immigrant of peasant origin but belonging by occupation to the lower city class, and illustrates the tendency to disorganisation of the individual under the conditions involved in a rapid transition from one type of social organisation to another. Volume IV. treats the dissolution of the primary group and the social and political reorganisation and unification of peasant communities in Poland on the new ground of rational co-operation. Vol. V. is based on studies of the Polish immigrant in America, and shows the degrees and forms of disorganisation associated with a too rapid and inadequately mediated individualisation, with a sketch of the beginnings of reorganisation."

It is regrettable, after such an introduction, the volumes themselves do not justify the great expectation aroused by the high standard of other American works on immigrants, to mention Professor Boas's eminent researches alone. Thus, although in their programme the authors propose to deal with the Polish immigrant in Vol. V., as a matter of fact he forms the subject of all the volumes without a necessary preliminary sketch of his life in Poland.

If an attempt of this sort is made in the Introduction (pp. 87-303), it is as vague and inadequate as may be expected from an American who lacks both access to the necessary printed materials and personal contact with the peasant in Poland—apart from the fact that it is more difficult for an American to study a Polish peasant than for a member of a nation possessing its own peasantry. Hence our disappointment can be ascribed to the Polish collaborator, whose name is well known in a different sphere of research, but who in this instance has neglected such important sources as the series of Wisla (Vistula), an ethnographic periodical which we venture to suggest will give him much more suitable information than the paper Gazeta Swiateczna (Warsaw), to which he acknowledges his indebtedness.

If the reader who approaches this work hopes to learn from it where in the old and new world Polish peasants live, how