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Editorial The Index The Secretary has asked that members' attention should be Volume called to the Index to the first fifty-four volumes of the Montgomeryshire Collections which is now in the press, and which consists of nearly 120 pages of double columns. It should be available by the beginning of 1962, either with a card binding similar to that of our annual volume, or bound in thin boards; the former will cost 5/ and the latter 10/ The low prices have been made possible by a generous grant from the Welsh Church Acts Committee of the Mont- gomeryshire County Council, and by a legacy of £ 200 from the late J. B. Willans, F.S.A. Mr. Willans was an active member of the Club from 1899 to his death in 1957. So keenly did he feel the lack of an index that he once employed a young friend to make him an index in manuscript. The forthcoming volume was pre- pared by a committee, and is a carefully prepared and detailed work. It is appro- priately dedicated to the memory of J. B. Willans. Applications for copies should be made to the Secretary. On Keeping The "Middle" article of the Times Literary Supplement, Alert 23rd October, 1961, contained sound advice about pre- serving a wide outlook in the study of local history. Its writer, who was discussing the importance of the work of the French historian, Marc Bloch, referred to "what some would regard as his greatest work, Les caractères originaux de Vhistoire rurale francaise, wherein place-names, aerial surveys, ancient implements and folk-lore are all profitably called in to assist the elucidation of the relevant documents. The result was perhaps the most illuminating exposition that exists of French peasant life in the Middle Ages. Soil and topography, tech- niques of cultivation, and forms of settlement were for Bloch among the essential sources of exact history, and they were particularly important in describing an age in which agriculture was the basic occupation of men." The First When Iona and Peter Opie began to gather material for Step their book on The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, Oxford University Press, 1959, one of the difficulties that faced them at the start was, they said, that "we had first to find out what there was to find out, before we knew whether there existed a subject to study" (p.v.). This statement will sound familiarly to most local historians. It is only when we have made some progress that we find how many-sided the subject is, and how fully it will occupy all the time we can give to it.