OF all the people who intend to write a book, folklorists are probably the most liable to leave, at their death, a pile of partly sorted notes. Their material, covering the whole of human life, seems to be impossible to organise; or, as with Mr Casaubon's 'Key to the Mythologies,' to await a unifying principle. It may be simply that the pleasure of travelling around talking to 'the folk' about their beliefs and customs, and the satisfactions of continual discovery and accumulation, leave the idea of publication as a goal in the future. Some conscientious successor then inherits the task of putting the material into publishable form; partly, perhaps, from a dislike of waste, but chiefly as a tribute to the assembler's zeal and enthusiasm and from a sense of obligation to the dead. Many of the source books of folklore followed this pattern. Francis Bacon, whose Sylva Sylvarum, 1627, is now used as a folklore source although it was assembled solely in the interests of science, died before he could finish the book. His chaplain and amanuensis, Dr Rawley, published it although, as Dr Rawley says in his preface, he had 'heard his Lordship often say; that if he should have served the glory of his own Name he had been better not to have published this Natural History: For it may seeme an Indigested Heap of Particulars; and cannot have that Lustre, which Bookes cast into Methods have.' None of John Aubrey's manuscript collections were published in his lifetime except the Miscellanies of 1696, but had to wait for the more congenial climate of the nineteenth century. Examples can be found almost up to the present day. Georgina Jackson's large but 'bewildering accumulation' of memoranda and letters on folklore subjects was edited after her death by Charlotte Burne, as Shropshire Folk-Lore, 1883. Vincent Stuckey Lean's massive copyings were printed posthumously as Lean's Collectanea, 1902-4. 'Had Mr. Lean revised the work for printing, he would probably have done much in the way of arrangement and collocation, said the editor. But revising is something that Mr Lean would never have done-his life was too pleasantly divided between his club and the British Museum Reading Room when in England, and the pursuit of proverbs when abroad; his books and papers were stored away in packing cases, where he constantly added to them. Similarly, the task of organising Dr Frank C. Brown's accumulation of folklore notes after his death in 1943 fell to the various specialist members of an editorial board who, under the general title of North Carolina Folklore, produced the seventh and final volume in 1964. Dr Brown himself had preferred 'riding joyously about the mountains recording songs' to the tedium of analysing and editing. The supreme example of the two-handed achievement, however, is the Revd John Brand's Observations on Popular Antiquities, which is still, in spite of its deficiencies, the folklorists' and journalists' first resource. In a sense Brand could be seen as having inherited notes from the Revd Henry Bourne, for although Bourne did indeed complete and publish Antiquitates Vulgares; or, the Antiquities of the Common People, 1725, he did so for a particular and limited purpose.