Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/379

Rh simply given a number of sayings, some of traditional, some of literary, origin, roughly classified under their subjects. He admits that they are of little meteorological value. Their sources are sometimes indicated, more usually not. In very few instances is the exact reference to the authority given. Such a book may amuse; it cannot be of real use to anyone. The best things in the book are the frontispiece from Colonel Saunders' photographs of clouds (many of these, though small, are of great beauty) and the bibliographical appendix. But, owing to the meagreness of the references, the latter is a very poor guide to the quotations.

little book contains a collection of children's rhymes, popular jingles and proverbs taken down from the mouths of the people. As they have been chiefly noted in Pomerania many of them are given in a form of dialect showing the close relationship between the vocabularies of English and Plattdeutsch. One or two of the verses appear to be variants of our own ancestral nursery rhymes; but some of them are manifestly modern, for instance, the one commemorating Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. In the preface of the collector it is pointed out that in the neighbourhood of Guetersloh, in Westphalia, St. Michael took the place of Wodan on the introduction of Christianity, and that till the present day, even, children sing in honour of the conquering archangel at Michaelmas, the season when a three days' harvest and conquest-festival used to be held to Wodan. In other districts it is St. Martin for whom songs are chanted, St. Martin being, like the great sky-god whom he superseded, famous for his cloak.