Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/551

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Reviews.
515

Yet they do die. The author bemoans their disappearance in eloquent language. In the course of modern evolution, he observes, local picturesqueness everywhere gives way before commonplace uniformity. Artists and the curious witness their transformation with regret, but without power to prevent them. The former paint landscapes or monuments which will be some day destroyed or defaced ; the latter collect, while yet there is time, the details of these peculiarities of days that have passed away, as one may learn to listen to an old grandmother recounting the memories of her youth. By and by, at least, if there remains no more of all that once constituted the ancient Brittany, it will be possible, by visiting the local museums, by looking at pictures, or by reading the books that describe its peculiarities, to evoke the remembrance of the past, but only as you seek again the charm and scent of a flower, once so fresh and fair, now faded and flattened between the leaves of a book.


Národopisný Věstńik Českoslovanský. Vydává Společnost Národopisného Musea Českoslovanského. Bohemia: Prague, 1910–1.

This publication of the Bohemian Slavonic Ethnographical Museum in Prague is devoted to ethnography in a fairly wide sense, and covers many technological matters outside the scope of Folk-Lore.

In the first number for 1910 S. Souček discusses the sources of F. Bartoš’s collection of Moravian national songs, published by the Bohemian Academy in 1901, and at the end, as a supplement, is the second part of the tales from Kladno collected by J. Kubín and commented on by J. Polivka. The latter also reviews at length Sir G. L. Gomme's Folklore as an Historical Science, and summarizes A. Aarne's study of Vergleichende Märchenforschungen (the magic ring, the three enchanted things, the magic fruit, and the magic bird), adding a long list of sources not cited by Aarne.