Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/609

Rh him. An essential preliminary to any general treatment of cultural problems in Polynesia is the compilation of a series of monographs, each dealing with the culture of a group. Students have long awaited such a monograph on the material culture of Fiji from the pen of Baron Anatole von Hügel, of Cambridge, and one on the Marquesas from Prof, von den Steinen, of Berlin. It is greatly to be hoped that a competent ethnologist will undertake the same task for Easter Island. Until this is done discussion will often be mere beating of the air. But the problem raised by Mr. Balfour and Dr. Rivers is a fascinating one, and the discussion thus far has been by no means fruitless.

the above reference, under the title "A Children's Game and the Lyke Wake," an article was contributed by Mary A. Berkeley, and as I believe I have the complete poem, I am forwarding it. When we were children we had a maid named Mary Shea whose stock of folk-songs was endless, and out of the list, which embraced "Me Parents Reared Me Tenderly," "The Cock-a-Doodle-Doo," "The Raffle," "The Croppy Boy," "The Lowlands Low," and any other songs of similar nature, we children always gave preference to the "Skin and Bone" song, as Mary termed it. The "Cuckoo" was another favourite; but since I have grown up, I have often wondered where the song earned its title, as seemingly the cuckoo arrives merely in the second verse, and is never heard of again

60 Putnam Street, East Boston, Mass., U.S.A.

There was an old woman. All skin and bone. Whose like in England N'er was known.