Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/165

Rh call either for book knowledge or profound scholarship. Be it always remembered that philological research has these distinct fields—(a) The genesis or kinship of a word; (b) its various applications; (c) its distribution, if vernacular. These are precisely analogous to the great departments of research in the natural sciences of observation. The scholar must be left to discuss the first in his dictionaries. For the other two, “the plain man may well be a valuable and competent witness, but to gather his evidence demands wide observation and generous co-operation. The foregoing pages have attempted to show that the “plain” man’s field of observation possesses a broad, human interest, in which mere dictionary-making must be deficient.

It is a hopeful sign of progress that education is at last recognising the value of Bacon's two-fold instrument for the acquisition of knowledge—observation and experiment. In the natural sciences we readily concede a place to this method, but in the study of language we are still devoted to books. The naturalist explores sea and land in search of truth, but human nature offers a still wider field in recovering the fading traces of old customs, manners, and beliefs, embedded in obscure terms and proverbial sayings. And the joy of following up one of those survivals and garnering the crowd of associated recollections which it suggests is of far more vital, because more human, interest than the accumulation of “specimens,” stuffed or dried.

The following study is designed as a specimen of what might be called field-philology. The invention of printing has helped to make us all forget that the spoken, not the written, word is the true phase of a living language. This is specially true of the vernacular. If we wish to get into intimate touch with its diction we must catch it from the lips of those who think and feel in it. And if the listener is in a similar position, there will arise a real bond of sympathy and a fruitful stimulus to the imagination. With a view to such study I prepared a list of terms familiar to me as the general vernacular of my youth