ypt, in Peru, in North America, and
South Africa, as well as in Europe. In a few words it is possible to
sketch the various theories of the origin and diffusion of legends like
these.

I. According to what may be called the Aryan theory (advocated by Grimm,
M. Andre Lefevre, Von Hahn, and several English writers), the stories
are peculiar to peoples who speak languages of the Aryan family. These
peoples, in some very remote age, before they left their original seats,
developed a copious mythology, based mainly on observation of natural
phenomena, Dawn, Thunder, Wind, Night, and the like. This mythology was
rendered possible by a 'disease of language,' owing to which statements
about phenomena came to appear like statements about imaginary persons,
and so grew into myths. _Maerchen_, or popular tales, are the _debris_,
or _detritus_, or youngest form of those myths, worn by constant passing
from mouth to mouth. The partisans of this theory often maintain that
the borrowing of tales by one people from another is, if not an
impossible, at least a very rare process.

II. The next hypothesis may be called the Indian theory. The chief
partisan of this theory was Benfey, the translator and commentator of
the _Pantschatantra_. In France M. Cosquin, author of _Contes Populaires
de Lorraine_, is the leading representative. According to the Indian
theory, the original centre and fountain of popular tales is India, and
from India of the historic period the legends were diffused over Europe,
Asia, and Africa. Oral tradition, during the great national movements
and migrations, and missions,--the Mongol conquests, the crusades, the
Buddhist enterprises, and in course of trade and commerce, diffused the
tales. They were also in various translations,--Persian, Arabic,
Greek,--of Indian literary collections like the _Pantschatantra_ and the
_Hitopadesa_, brought to the knowledge of mediaeval Europe. Preachers
even used the tales as parables or 'examples' in the pulpit, and by all
those means the stories found their way about the world. It is admitted
that the discovery of _contes_ in Egypt, at a date when nothing is known
of India, is a difficulty in the way of this theory, as we are not able
to show that those _contes_ came from India, nor that India borrowed
them from Egypt. The presence of the tales in America is explained as
the consequence of importations from Europe, since the discovery of the
New World by Columbus.

Neither of