choose, and behave kindly or unkindly. The stories are full of
the oldest ideas of ages when science did not exist, and magic
took the place of science. Anybody who has the curiosity to read
the 'Legendary Australian Tales,' which Mrs. Langloh Parker has
collected from the lips of the Australian savages, will find that
these tales are closely akin to our own. Who were the first
authors of them nobody knows--probably the first men and women.
Eve may have told these tales to amuse Cain and Abel. As people
grew more civilised and had kings and queens, princes and
princesses, these exalted persons generally were chosen as heroes
and heroines. But originally the characters were just 'a man,'
and 'a woman,' and 'a boy,' and 'a girl,' with crowds of beasts,
birds, and fishes, all behaving like human beings. When the
nobles and other people became rich and educated, they forgot the
old stories, but the country people did not, and handed them
down, with changes at pleasure, from generation to generation.
Then learned men collected and printed the country people's
stories, and these we have translated, to amuse children. Their
tastes remain like the tastes of their naked ancestors, thousands
of years ago, and they seem to like fairy tales better than
history, poetry, geography, or arithmetic, just as grown-up
people like novels better than anything else.

This is the whole truth of the matter. I have said so before,
and I say so again. But nothing will prevent children from
thinking that I invented the stories, or some ladies from being
of the same opinion. But who really invented the stories nobody
knows; it is all so long ago, long before reading and writing
were invented. The first of the stories actually written down,
were written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, or on Babylonian cakes of