In his collection of Scottish proverbs from literary texts written before 1600 Bartlett Jere Whiting has laid a solid foundation for the investigation of early Scottish proverbs and has promised a survey of later collections. [1] The following brief remarks are not intended to anticipate his survey but rather to suggest the place of this particular
collection in the historical development and to point out the questions that it raises. Before 1600 men in Scotland had begun to make collections of proverbs.