if I sum up in the form of theses the conclusions I have arrived at as the result of some five years’ study of the folk-tale.
(1) The “unnatural incidents” in folk-tales often represent survivals of savage culture (Lang, Farrer).
(2) But unnatural incidents can become conventional, and used and imported without reference to their savage origin.
(3) Resemblance between folk-tales, extending beyond three or four linkages of incident, is due to transmission, not casual coincidence, however far distant the places of collection.
(4) When such resemblances exist between European folk-tales and those found widely spread, or anciently collected, in the Indian Peninsula, the probability of origin rests with India (Benfey, Cosquin). Such tales are rarely more than a third of the story-store of any one country, probably not a tenth of the whole of European folk-tales.[1]
(5) Tales having foreign parallels to all or most of their incidents in the same plot, cannot be used as anthropological evidence, except for the country of their origin.
(6) Tales with definite plot, of complicated yet artistic form, are not primitive in origin.
(7) Tales of complicated plot, and more than three or four incidents, must have been thought out in the first instance by a definite folk-artist.
(8) Tales struggle for existence in the folk-mind, and the more artistic oust the less and survive.
These seem to be the inductions to which we are led by a survey of the actual contents of the folk-tales of the Indo-European world, without prejudice to any theories as to what lies behind those facts derived from any universal history of mankind.
Lastly I come, for a particular reason, to our President’s
- ↑ I made this estimate so long ago as 1888 in my edition of The Fables of Bidpai, p. xxxiv.
