come since the rise of Buddhism. Nay, they go further. In
every instance where a beast appears as helping the hero, we are taught
to presume that the hero has first helped the beast, even though no
trace of such an incident be actually found. It must have been so,
otherwise the beast would have had no motive for helping the hero,--and,
it may be added, the theorist would have had no ground for claiming the
story as proceeding from a Buddhist source.

Now all this would have been seen at once to be very poor reasoning, but
for one fact. A number, sufficient to be called large, of parables, have
actually made their way from India to Europe in historic times, and
since the age of Gautama. The literary history of these parables can be
traced; and it must be acknowledged that, whatever their origin, they
have been adopted into Buddhist works and adapted to Buddhist doctrine.
Further, it seems demonstrated that some of them have descended into the
oral tradition of various nations in Europe, Asia, and even Africa. But
when so much as this is conceded, it still fails to account for the
spread of the story of the Grateful Beasts and, even more signally, for
the incident of the Beast-helpers where there is no gratitude in the
case. A very slight examination of the incident as it appears in the
group of legends now before us will convince us of this.

First of all, let it be admitted that in several of these tales the
service rendered by the brute is in requital for a good turn on the part
of the hero. Andrianoro, as we have seen, begins by making friends with
various animals by means of the mammon of unrighteousness in the shape
of a feast. Jagatalapratapa, in the narrative already cited from the
Tamil book translated into English under the title of "The Dravidian
Nights Entertainments," pursuing one of Indra's four daughters, is
compelled by her father, after three other trials, to choose her out
from her sisters, who are all converted into one shape. He prays
assistance from a kind of grasshopper; and the little creature, in
return for a previous benefit, hops upon her foot. But it is somewhat
curious, if the theory be true, that even in stories told among peoples
distinctly under Buddhist influence the gratitude is by no means an
invariable point. Thus the princess in the Burmese drama is betrayed by
"the king of flies" to her husband, though the abstract we have of the
play gives us no hint of any previous transaction betwe