Excerpt from The Folk-Lore Record, Vol. 2
I have been asked to contribute a preface to the Folk-Lore Record, and regret that want of time for due preparation prevents me from writing anything at all complete or adequate about the objects of the Society. Compelled to be brief, I must select one or two points on which I have already written with, perhaps, damnable iteration. The readers of the Record must pardon me if, like the narrators of the fairy stories we collect and study, I tell a twice-told tale.
The science of Folk-Lore examines the things that are the oldest, and most permanent, and most widely distributed, in human institutions. It is not meant, of course, that every caprice of rural or social superstition is old, and permanent, and widely distributed. I have never heard that cannibals scruple to dine when there are thirteen in company; or that Assyrians, Egyptians, and Andaman islanders, think it a perilous thing to walk under a ladder. It is not even in every English county that the robin redbreast"s appearance in a house is a sign of approaching death, and very probably Spanish peasants do not hold, like the Scotch, that the yellowhammer "drinks a drop of the deil"s blood every May morning."
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