membrum! Here's a felled tree.' Thus every
monkey passed by clear of the trunk, until the last one came by; and
he was both blind and deaf. When he followed the rest, he could not
hear the tortoise call out, and his membrum struck against the fallen
trunk. He stopped, and became aware of the tortoise underneath. Then
he screamed to the rest; and all the monkeys came running back,
and surrounded the tortoise, threatening him." This incident, in its
present form obscure and unreasonable (it is hard to see how following
the tortoise's directions would have saved the monkeys from injury,
and how the blind and deaf monkey "became aware" of the tortoise just
because he hit the tree), probably originally represented the tortoise
as seizing the last monkey with his teeth (present form, "his membrum
struck against the fallen trunk"), so that in this way the monkey
became painfully aware of the tortoise's close proximity. Hence his
screams, too,--of pain. With incident B2 two other Buddhist stories
are to be compared. The "Mahisa-jataka," No. 278, tells how an impudent
monkey voids his excrement on a patient buffalo (the Bodhisatta) under
a tree. The vile monkey is later destroyed when he plays the same
trick on another bull. In the "Kapi-jataka," No. 404, a bad monkey
drops his excrement first on the head and then into the mouth of a
priest, who later takes revenge on the monkey by having him and all
his following of five hundred destroyed. All in all, the agreement
in general outline and in some details between these Hindoo stories
and ours justifies us, I believe, in assuming without hesitation that
our stories are descended directly from Buddhistic fables, possibly
these very Jatakas. Compare also the notes to Nos. 48 and 56.

For a Celebes variant of the story of "The Monkey and the Turtle,"
see Bezemer, p. 287.

The sources of the other incidents, which I have not found in the
Buddhistic stories, I am unable to point out. However, many of them
occur in the beast tales of other Oriental and Occidental countries:
for instance, incident E is a commonplace in "Brer Rabbit" stories
both in Africa and America, whence it has made its way into the tales
of the American Indians (see, for example, Honey, 82; Cole, 195, note;
Daehnhardt, 4 : 43-45); incident J and another droll episode found in
an Ilocano story--"king's bell" (= beehive) motif--occur in a Milanau
tale from Sarawak, Borneo, "The Plandok, Deer, and the Pig" (Roth, 1 :