These were just two of a plethora of academic societies founded in the latter half of the 19th century by educated members of the emerging middle class.[28] For literate, urban intellectuals and students of folklore the folk was someone else and the past was recognized as being something truly different.[29] Folklore became a measure of the progress of society, how far we had moved forward into the industrial present and indeed removed ourselves from a past marked by poverty, illiteracy and superstition. The task of both the professional folklorist and the amateur at the turn of the 20th century was to collect and classify cultural artifacts from the pre-industrial rural areas, parallel to the drive in the life sciences to do the same for the natural world.[note 3] "Folk was a clear label to set materials apart from modern life…material specimens, which were meant to be classified in the natural history of civilization. Tales, originally dynamic and fluid, were given stability and concreteness by means of the printed page."[30]