guardian influence of the mother-soul is
prominent throughout but need not be too much emphasized for modern
children.

II. ALL CHANGE

This nonsense story is found widely spread, especially in Romance
tongues, French, Italian, Provencal, and Portuguese; but it is also
found in Ireland (see _Celtic Fairy Tales_), Hanover, Transylvania,
Esthonia, and Russia; so that it has claims to be included in the
fairy book of all Europe. Cosquin, ii., 209-14, gives a number of
Oriental stories, Annamite, Kalmuk, Kaffir, which contain the incident
of the girl in the bag, and Indian and Kabyle stories, which go
through the same exchanges as our story. In the latter case it is an
animal story in which the jackal has a thorn picked out of his paws by
an old woman, and gets an egg out of her in exchange for the thorn
which he has "lost." In this form the jackal helps considerably in the
disappearance of the successive exchanges. It is difficult to say
whether the European or the Indian form was the earlier. The animal
_dramatis personae_ seem less incongruous and turn the scale in favour
of India.

III. KING OF THE FISHES

This is practically the Perseus legend of antiquity, which has been
made the subject of an elaborate study by Mr. E. Sidney Hartland, _The
Legend of Perseus_, 3 vols., London, 1894-6. Mr. Hartland
distinguishes four chains of incidents in the story:

1. The Supernatural Birth.
2. The Life Token.
3. The Rescue of Andromeda.
4. The Medusa Witch.

Not all the variants, which are very numerous, running from Ireland to
Cambodia, include all these four incidents. The Greek Perseus legend,
for instance, has not the Life Token. Cosquin, i., 67, knows of only
eighteen which have the full contingent, one in Brittany, two in
Greece, one in Sicily, four in Italy, one each--Basque, Spanish,
Catalan, Portuguese, Danish, and Swedish; two German; one Lithuanian;
and a Russian variant. There must be many more in Bolte's notes to
Grimm, 60. These are sufficient to prove that the whole concatenation
of incident is European, though it is difficult to understand how the
Medusa incident got tacked on to the preceding three, with which it is
very loosely combined, the only point of connection being with the
Life Token. Strangely enough, in the ancient form of the folk-tale,
the Gorgon is an almost essential part of the story, though the Life
Token has disappeared, and the Supernatural Birth only applies to the
hero and not t