Caroline Furness Jayne

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Caroline Furness Jayne (1873-1909) was an American ethnologist. She wrote perhaps the first, and best-known, book on string figures, String Figures and How to Make Them.

A graduate of Philadelphia's Agnes Irwin School, she was the wife of Horace Jayne, a biology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Her brother, William Henry Furness, received his M.D. from Penn and was an "extensive traveler" and a fellow of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain.

Her string figure mentor was Alfred Haddon, a Cambridge ethnologist who began the introduction to her book by noting that "in ethnology . . . nothing is too insignificant to receive attention" He then goes on to defend the research invested in the unpromising amusement of string figures. Jayne, an extensive traveler herself, was the first to create a popular study of string figures building on dry academic papers which appeared in journals like The Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology and the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society as well as in a variety of foreign language anthropological journals.

String Figures and How to Make Them was first published in 1906 (ISBN 0-8446-2318-0), and was reprinted by Dover in 1965 (ISBN 0-613-81171-2 and later ISBN 0-486-20152-X).