Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/70

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LOOKING back through former volumes of the Journal, it strikes one very forcibly how little of English folk-lore they contain. While school attendance officers, newspaper-vendors, and popular scientific lecturers, are prowling about our most retired country villages, our members are calmly engaged in "surveying mankind from China to Peru," apparently in happy unconsciousness that these modern Aids to the Advancement of Learning are rapidly destroying the curious old folk-learning which it was surely the original purpose of the Society to record before it should be too late.

There must be some misapprehension in the minds of our country members, or this would not be so. Is it that they are bashful, and wait to be asked to contribute? In that case, it might be well to insert an editorial notice to the effect that brief local notes are welcome. Or do they think the numberless little matters of folk-lore which must come under the observation of dwellers in the country are too trivial or too well-known to be worth recording? If so, they surely make a great mistake. In the first place, it is just as rash for persons who have chiefly lived in one place to conclude that what is familiar to them must be familiar to all the world, as it is to fly into the opposite (but not uncommon) error of fancying that what is customary in their own neighbourhood is peculiar to the locality and unknown to the rest of the world. Besides, even though a given item may be known elsewhere, it has more than once been pointed out in the Journal that the geographical distribution of folk-lore is a matter