whether the ruse was
suggested by the Folk-Tale, cannot now be ascertained.

Benfey, in an elaborate dissertation, first communicated to "Ausland"
in 1859, but now included in his _Kleinere Schriften_, ii., 156-223,
argues for the Eastern origin of the whole cycle, which he traces back
to the "Seventy Tales of the Parrot" (Suka Saptati) probably as early
as the sixth century. Here the vizier Sakatala of the King Nanda is
released from prison in order to determine which of two identical
horses is mare and which is foal, and which part of a truncated log is
root or branch. Benfey traces this and similar riddlesome difficulties
to a good deal of Eastern literature in Tibet, Mongolia and Persia,
and Arabia. But he fails to find any very exact parallels in the
European area which, at that time, was very little explored. He finds
the nearest parallel in Wuk, No. 25, but this is by no means a full
variant of the other European tales and may have even been
"contaminated" from the East. Benfey notices the Saga parallel but
goes so far as even to claim this as being influenced by Eastern
stories. Since his time a much closer parallel has been found in
Kashmir by Knowles' _Folk Tales of Kashmir_, pages 484-90, repeated in
_Indian Fairy Tales_, No. xxiv., "Why the Fish Laughed." But the
parallelism here extends only to the cleverness of the girl and the
ingenuity of her answers to the riddles, not to the actual plot of the
story which is so uniform in Europe. Altogether we must reject
Benfey's contention, at any rate for this particular story.

XXIV. THUMBKIN

I have followed, for the most part, Bolte's reconstruction, which
practically consists of a combination of Grimm, 37 and 45. But in
combining the two I have found it necessary to omit sections D and E
of Bolte's formula which form the beginning of Grimm, 45, "Thumbkin as
Journeyman."

The notion of a baby the size of a doll might be regarded as
"universally human"; even the Greeks knew of manikins no bigger than
their thumbs and weighing not more than an obolus (Athenaeus, xii.,
77); there is an epigram of the same subject in the Greek Anthology,
ii., 350. But the particular adventures of Thumbkin are so
consistently identical throughout Europe, especially with regard to
the adventures in the cow's stomach, that it is impossible to consider
the stories as independent. Cosquin, 53, has more difficulty than
usual in finding real parallels in the Orient. In England, of c