Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/609

Rh the most promising fields of folk-lore exploration in the United States. There has been a strange mingling of races in Louisiana. The result is that relics of the voodoo or obi rites, conjurings, magic, medical superstitions, fables, plantation songs, and religious notions of the negroes linger on side by side with the superstitions, ghost stories, omens, charms, nursery tales, and rhymes brought by the whites from Europe. The quaint dialects of these settlers offer an inviting field of study which should not be overlooked.

The Louisiana Association has given an impulse to folk lore study in the State, and it has resulted in the collection of many stories and superstitions current among the Creoles and negroes "before the war." The ladies have contributed many items of traditionary lore. Mrs. Preston Johnston, Mrs. Mason Cooke, Mrs. C. V. Jamison, and Mrs. M. E. Davis have written out stories told to them in childhood by their negro nurses. The folk lore of French Louisiana has been collected by Prof. Fortier during the past twenty years. Some of this valuable material has appeared in the Folk-lore Journal, and some of it, entitled Bits of Louisiana Folk Lore, was printed in the Transactions of the Modern Language Association for 1887. Thanks to American scholarship, not to American liberality, the complete work of Prof. Fortier will be issued shortly, as the second of a series of monographs of the American Folklore Society.

It is with pleasure that we record the establishment of a society for the study of folk lore in Canada. The formation of the Montreal branch was due largely to the diplomatic efforts of Prof. D. P. Penhallow and Mr. John Reade, who soon had the cordial sympathy and support of many Canadian students, among whom