of course, follow that, because a story is found both in
Europe and Asia, therefore the western version has been borrowed from
the east. Europe has, doubtless, sometimes lent a fancy to Asia. Greek
fables are supposed to have exercised an influence upon the Indian
mind. European missionaries may have sometimes rendered a Christian
legend current among Hindus. Professor Monier Williams was assured by
an intelligent native that the spread of railways had materially
diminished the number of malignant ghosts in India. Still, as a
general rule, the east is stubbornly conservative. The Japanese, it is
true, are abandoning their own costume and art for ours, not entirely
to their advantage. But the various peoples of India have never shown
any such tendencies towards change. In their popular fiction, at all
events, they have never shown an inclination to import foreign
manufactures in order to replace their home products. In their
thoughts and feelings they are now very much what they have been for
periods of time which it would be difficult to define. When we find
stories now current in all parts of India, which we know from their
occurrence in Sanskrit literature must have existed there very long
ago, and we see that the mythological element in those stories is in
accordance with religious ideas that have prevailed there for
countless centuries, we can have no doubt that these stories were
framed there at a very early period. Then if we find almost identical
stories current in all parts of Europe, many of their at least
apparently mythological features offering difficulties which cannot be
removed by a reference to the mythologies of the heathen ancestors of
the peasants who now repeat them, it seems not unreasonable to come to
the conclusion that such stories have been borrowed by the west from
the east. From mythological germs common to European and Asiatic
Aryans, it is quite true that legends might arise in Europe and in
Asia, independent of each other, but similar in their general tenor.
But it is not likely that out of any common germ could be
independently developed in several different countries as many
variants of the same tale, in each of which there is a similar
sequence of scenes or acts, and the dramatic action is brought to a
close by a termination that scarcely ever varies. Far more difficult
is it to believe in such a triumph of independent development, than to
place reliance upon a statement to the effect th