Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/111

Rh whole. I do not think we shall find any arrangement better suited for this purpose than Mr. Gomme's great fourfold marshalling of it under the heads (as I venture to predict they would be called in practical use) of Traditions, Superstitions, Customs, and Sayings.

I think Mr. Gomme's "formula" (p. 15), also admirable, and likely to prove most useful. It is delightful to get a clue to the relative value of the various "parallels"—close or distant, near or far. The number of them is sometimes quite bewildering: one cannot use all, and there has hitherto been no guide to making a judicious choice among them. I know some think that collectors should do nothing but collect, and should not give parallels; but I think this is a pity, for the sake of beginners and outsiders, who without parallels cannot "see the point" of what is recorded. We ought not to neglect anything that tends to make our writings more interesting, and therefore to attract recruits to the army of workers.

Though it is beyond my province, I cannot refrain from "saying my say" on the vexed question of the scope and definition of folklore.

Folk-lore:—that is, folk-learning. Do we mean the learning of scholars about the folk? or the learning of the folk themselves? If the former, then there are no limits to our scope. We must include the study of the habitations, the handicrafts, the dialects of the folk: we take in archæology and philology—subjects which we know are in themselves enough to occupy the whole attention of a man of science, and I may add, of many Societies. But if by folk-lore we mean "the folk's learning," the learning of the folk themselves, then we may define the science which deals with it as that which treats of all that the folk believe or practise on the authority of inherited tradition, and not on the authority of written records. And in these days of universal printing and reading, the study of "the unwritten learning of the people" is indeed "the study of survivals."