of Story," written in the twelfth century by
Somadeva of Cashmere, the Indian King Putraka, wandering in the Vindhya
Mountains, similarly discomfits two brothers who are quarrelling over
a pair of shoes, which are like the sandals of Hermes, and a bowl which
has the same virtue as Aladdin's lamp. "Why don't you run a race for
them?" suggests Putraka; and, as the two blockheads start furiously off,
he quietly picks up the bowl, ties on the shoes, and flies away! [7]

It is unnecessary to cite further illustrations. The tales here quoted
are fair samples of the remarkable correspondence which holds good
through all the various sections of Aryan folk-lore. The hypothesis
of lateral diffusion, as we may call it, manifestly fails to explain
coincidences which are maintained on such an immense scale. It is quite
credible that one nation may have borrowed from another a solitary
legend of an archer who performs the feats of Tell and Palnatoki; but it
is utterly incredible that ten thousand stories, constituting the entire
mass of household mythology throughout a dozen separate nations, should
have been handed from one to another in this way. No one would venture
to suggest that the old grannies of Iceland and Norway, to whom we owe
such stories as the Master Thief and the Princesses of Whiteland, had
ever read Somadeva or heard of the treasures of Rhampsinitos. A large
proportion of the tales with which we are dealing were utterly unknown
to literature until they were taken down by Grimm and Frere and
Castren and Campbell, from the lips of ignorant peasants, nurses, or
house-servants, in Germany and Hindustan, in Siberia and Scotland.
Yet, as Mr. Cox observes, these old men and women, sitting by the
chimney-corner and somewhat timidly recounting to the literary explorer
the stories which they had learned in childhood from their own
nurses and grandmas, "reproduce the most subtle turns of thought and
expression, and an endless series of complicated narratives, in which
the order of incidents and the words of the speakers are preserved
with a fidelity nowhere paralleled in the oral tradition of historical
events. It may safely be said that no series of stories introduced
in the form of translations from other languages could ever thus have
filtered down into the lowest strata of society, and thence have sprung
up again, like Antaios, with greater energy and heightened beauty."
There is indeed no alternative for us but to admit th