intercourse, that it seems an insoluble task to decide who borrowed from whom. It is even possible that a nation may borrow back what it has once lent. Thus, during my researches into the history of the Æsopic Fables, I found instances of fables which had once been Indian and had been brought to Greece, translated from Greek into Arabic, and in that strange guise re-entering India; or, in other words, in the last resort, India borrows from India. Nor can we trust the early appearance of a tale in literary form as any sure guide as to its original home, though, after all, if it is very early, that is some presumption. Most of the fables which Greece borrowed from India appear in Greek earlier than in Sanskrit.
That reference to India may lead me to deal with a theory which would solve all the problems of diffusion, if only it were entirely true. It is that represented by M. Cosquin, who says in effect: "India is the original home of the folk-tale. From there it has been carried by war, by commerce, by religious propagandism, to all the nations of the Old World, so that if we find the Samoans telling the same tale as West Highlanders, it is because both in the last resort borrowed it from India."
Now, undoubtedly, in his elaborate notes to his Contes de la Lorraine, a storehouse of variants and parallels that is indispensable to the serious student, M. Cosquin has brought together an immense mass of evidence showing that the majority, not alone of the incidents of European folk-tales, but also of the welding together of these incidents into similar plots, are to be found in India. What I fail to observe in M. Cosquin's excursuses is any attempt to determine the question whether India may not have borrowed both incidents and plots from Europe, as well as vice versâ. Whenever Indian meets European, European meets Indian, and borrowing is often a mutual process. Indeed, I think one of the interesting results of our study is likely to be the hitherto unnoticed fact that stories are the currency of social converse between folk of various races. Races "swop" stories; and I think it will be found to be a Grimm's law that the closer nations are the more stories they have in common. Till M. Cosquin, therefore, considers the possibility of India borrowing, we cannot allow him to have proved that India has lent.
It is in connection with this exclusively Eastern origin of our
