suggests Putraka; and, as the two blockheads start furiously
off, he quietly picks up the bowl, ties on the shoes, and
flies away![7]

[7] The same incident is repeated in the story of Hassan of
El-Basrah. See Lane's Arabian Nights, Vol. III p. 452.

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