Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/210

 202 THE SCIENCE OF FOLK-LORE.

answer would be that the difficulty looks much greater than it is. The requirements are not in reality very difficult to understand, and when grasped fulfilment is almost instinctive. One can learn some- thing here from school-children. Most boys in a well-taught school will correctly point out the verbs, adverbs and nouns in a sentence, though not one of them has ever understood, or is indeed ever likely to understand, the jumble of ideas that does duty in the school grammar for the definitions of these parts of speech. Definitions are in fact the most difficult of all points for a teacher to tackle, and are formidable to the student only in appearance, and that because, being so difficult, they are often clumsily expressed. Practically no one is too humble to observe a Folk-lore fact, and no fact is too trifling or commonplace to be worthy of record. What is an every-day occurrence of no import in your neighbourhood may be a new revelation to the student seeking for links — the existence of which he suspects — to complete the chain of his investigations. The moral of the argument is, that between the rashness that would grasp at everything and the timidity that would be led by the nose, there lies a golden mean dependent on individual judgment. In the conduct of a scientific study — it being a human affair — something must be left to discretion, and this is a matter that cannot be avoided.

Having decided on what we are to observe we come to the method of record. Here accuracy and attention to essential details are paramount considerations : it being constantly borne in mind that every fact collected is intended to be an item to be eventually brought into account. Unaccompanied by such details as time, place, and nationality of currency and its history, where such is known, the bare statement of a fact is not of much use; while so to record it as to make it unfitted for collation is a mere waste of time. It is of great importance, too, that the collection should be systematically mude. Not long ago a little book was published, by my friend Mr. Man, on the Andamane?e Islanders, which is a reprint of papers read before the Anthropological Institute, and which is to my mind a model of what a systematic record should be. In it Mr. Man goes through his subject steadily point by point until he has given us a complete view of the savages he has studied. Commencing with their physical