in well-nigh the
same way by his descendant to-day." Mr Nutt does not enquire how long
the stories may have been told before the first story was written down.
Larminie, however, whose early death was the first great loss of our
intellectual movement, pushes them backward for untold ages in the
introduction to his _West Irish Folk Tales and Romances_. He builds up a
detailed and careful argument, for which I must refer readers to his
book, to prove that the Scottish Highlands and Ireland have received
their folk-lore both from "Aryan and Non-Aryan sources," and that in the
Highlands there is more non-Aryan influence and more non-Aryan blood
than in Ireland. He argues that nothing is more improbable than that all
folk-tales are Aryan, as has sometimes been supposed, and sums up as
follows:--

"They bear the stamp of the genius of more than one race. The pure and
placid but often cold imagination of the Aryan has been at work on some.
In others we trace the more picturesque fancy, the fierceness and
sensuality, the greater sense of artistic elegance belonging to races
whom the Aryan, in spite of his occasional faults of hardness and
coarseness, has, on the whole, left behind him. But as the greatest
results in the realm of the highest art have always been achieved in the
case of certain blends of Aryan with other blood, I should hardly deem
it extravagant if it were asserted that in the humbler regions of the
folk-tale we might trace the working of the same law. The process which
has gone on may in part have been as follows:--Every race which has
acquired very definite characteristics must have been for a long time
isolated. The Aryans during their period of isolation probably developed
many of their folk-germs into their larger myths, owing to the greater
constructiveness of their imagination, and thus, in a way, they used up
part of their material. Afterwards, when they became blended with other
races less advanced, they acquired fresh material to work on. We have in
Ireland an instance to hand, of which a brief discussion may help to
illustrate the whole race theory.

"The larger Irish legendary literature divides itself into three
cycles--the divine, the heroic, the Fenian. Of these three the last is
so well-known orally in Scotland that it has been a matter of dispute to
which country it really belongs. It belongs, in fact, to both. Here,
however, comes in a strange contrast with the other cycles. The first
is, so