Having acquired the information, the next step is to determine what is to be done with it. Disconnected records appear to possess some interest for certain persons, but they have no real value, they are materials but not an edifice—they tell no story. There are several methods of dealing with such material, as for example:
1. All the data from a given area may be collected together, and we have such useful books as the County Folklores. These give us a general conception concerning the mentality and practices of the local folk, and we owe a deep debt of gratitude to those who make these compilations. But a collection of this kind is only a means to an end. Information quâ information is practically of no value unless it has some bearing with regard to other information. The County Folklores do enable us to compare the mentality and practices of various parts of the country, but, even so, this does not take us very far. We have yet to discover what is the significance of the resemblances and differences between the folklore of two or more areas.
2. Another method is to plot the data on maps, a mode of investigation to which I referred last year, which has been greatly neglected by folklorists though it is one which promises very interesting and suggestive results. It can be adapted practically for all the data of folklore, though doubtless only certain types or groups of the data would yield definite results.
3. A third method is to group together all the data of folklore which have a periodicity in a time sequence. This is the work which is being undertaken by our Brand Committee.
When one studies the ceremonies and lesser rites of backward peoples it becomes evident that many of them have their roots in the economic life of these peoples. There are the observations which are made on natural phenomena in order to indicate when operations should
