Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/37

Rh and the Council hope that Members will do their best to hear this distinguished scholar.

At a meeting of the Society on 14th December, at 22, Albemarle Street, Mr. Edward Clodd read a paper on the "Philosophy of Punchkin." After remarks on the more serious meaning now sought for within the folk-tale, sober treatment of which was impossible while it was looked upon only as the vagrant of fancy, an abstract of the more important variants of the Punchkin group of stories was given. The central idea common to these tales, whether found among Aryan, Semitic, Finno-Ugrian, &c. races, however much obscured by local detail, is the dwelling apart of the soul or heart, as the seat of life, from the body; and its deposit in some animate or inanimate thing, chiefly animate, an egg or a bird being the frequent hiding-place, and the fate of the soul determining the fate of the body. This central idea, it was sought to show, was the belief, thus preserved in more or less dramatic form, of the barbaric mind in one or more entities in the body, yet not of it, and endowed with power to leave it at will and control its destiny; whilst the passage of the life-principle from princess or demon into bird or necklace was an easy assumption of the imagination which created its rude analogies between man and brutes and lifeless objects,

A little book treating chiefly of the Orkney Islands will be issued by Messrs. Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., in a few weeks. It is entitled Rambling Sketches in the Far North, and is written by Mr. R. Menzies Ferguson. Besides containing chapters upon historical and archaeological subjects, with descriptions of the principal isles, it will treat of the customs and superstitions of Orkney, land tenure, farming, folk-lore, and fairy tales.

The Rev. John M'Gavin Boyd delivered a lecture at Airdrie, on Dec. 10, the subject being "Scotch Proverbs." Mr. Boyd, at the outset of his lecture, inquired as to what was a proverb, and how this peculiar form of expression arose. There was no want of definitions, but he did not think a proverb was capable of direct definition. He quoted several classical definitions showing that brevity and point were the distinguishing features of the proverb, such as that by Cervantes, who called them "short sentences drawn from long experience," and Lord Bacon who said they "embodied the wit, genius,