Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/615

 It did not take Prof. Crane long to make the interesting discovery that the fables and "yarns" of Uncle Remus were parallel to stories Prof. Hartt heard from his guide on the Amazon River, to stories collected by Dr. Bleek in South Africa, and to popular tales in Europe. He was able to trace the majority of the Legends of the Old Plantation to their foreign variants. Prof. Crane is our acknowledged authority in the field of storiology. He first published a charming collection of Italian Popular Tales, with a scholarly introduction and elaborate notes. His able paper on Mediæval Sermons, Books, and Stories was followed by a critical edition of The Exempla, or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry, published by the English Folk-lore Society in its series of memoirs (1890). Jacques de Vitry was an eloquent and popular bishop of the thirteenth century, who made great use of apologues, or exempla, in his sermons, with the express purpose of instructing and sometimes of amusing his audiences. These illustrative stories were diffused over all Europe, and some of them have won their way into literature—have reappeared now in the fables of La Fontaine, and then in the plays of Molière and Shakespeare. Prof. Crane has published recently an edition of Chansons Populaires de la France, a selection from French popular ballads.

Thus far the work of American folk-lorists has been directed almost entirely to the collection of material to be collated and examined afterward according to scientific methods. American students think that the time has not yet come for theoretical discussions, such as English and Continental scholars have waged so sharply at times and without good cause. Nor are they ready yet to favor the establishment of a separate science of folk lore. In the Handbook, issued by the authority of the English Society, it is stated that "the definition of the science of folk lore, as the