Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/225

Rh Now, though I certainly did not give a thought to the Collector's convenience in working out this Classification, I trust that it will be found, nevertheless, to have what I believe to be one of the marks of a Scientific Classification—namely, easy comprehensibility, and, therefore, convenience. Customs, Sayings, and Poesies. Surely it will be always easy enough for the collector to know under which of these great classes he should place his find; and surely there will not probably be any find that cannot be placed in one or other of these Classes. And it is enough if the Folk-lore-collector, even as it is enough if the Plant-collector, can place his find correctly in one of these three great general classes. He is not required to assign it to its Sub-class, Genus, Species, and Variety.

It has, however, in the last number of the Folk-Lore Journal, been objected to the term Sayings as the Name of a Class of Folk-lore Records, that a Saying usually means a "form of words"; and it has even been said that there is "a very unscientific confusion" in using this term to include both formulas and Sayings that are not formulas. To this I answer first, with all due respect, that it is not the fact that a Saying, with the best writers, means only a formula. "Certainly his noble sayings can I not amend," says Chaucer. And "It was a common saying with him," says Sir Thomas More, "that such altercations were for a logician, and not for a philosopher." But, secondly, of the three Sub-classes into which Sayings are divided—namely, Prescriptions, Saws, and Forecasts, the vast majority are, I believe, "forms of words"; and hence, in the vast majority of cases, the term Sayings would be used in what is affirmed, though, as I have shown, incorrectly affirmed, to be its usual sense. And I may add that it seems a little illogical to object to my Class of Sayings after remarking that "Mr. Stuart Glennie's proposition, that we can only know what the people believe by what they do, or say, or relate, appears incontrovertible."

Similarly it is objected to my use of the term Poesy to include Stories, Songs, and Sagas, that "it would take ordinary minds some time to grasp the idea that they should place prose-matter under the head of poetry, or 'poesy,' a word which suggests a motto