put it forth. No one can, of course, imagine that during that long
succession of ages when this mighty wedge of Aryan migration was
driving its way through that prehistoric race, that nameless
nationality, the traces of which we everywhere find underlying the
intruders in their monuments and implements of bone and stone--a race
akin, in all probability, to the Mongolian family, and whose
miserable remnants we see pushed aside, and huddled up in the holes
and corners of Europe, as Lapps, and Finns, and Basques--No one, we
say, can suppose for a moment, that in that long process of contact
and absorption, some traditions of either race should not have been
caught up and adopted by the other. We know it to be a fact with
regard to their language, from the evidence of philology, which
cannot lie; and the witness borne by such a word as the Gothic Atta
for _father_, where a Mongolian has been adopted in preference
to an Aryan word, is irresistible on this point; but that, apart from
such natural assimilation, all the thousand shades of resemblance and
affinity which gleam and flicker through the whole body of popular
tradition in the Aryan race, as the Aurora plays and flashes in
countless rays athwart the Northern heaven, should be the result of
mere servile copying of one tribe's traditions by another, is a
supposition as absurd as that of those good country-folk, who, when
they see an Aurora, fancy it must be a great fire, the work of some
incendiary, and send off the parish engine to put it out. No! when we
find in such a story as the Master-thief traits, which are to be
found in the Sanscrit _Hitopadesa_ [4], and which reminds us at
once of the story of Rhampsinitus in Herodotus; which are also to be
found in German, Italian, and Flemish popular tales, but told in all
with such variations of character and detail, and such adaptations to
time and place, as evidently show the original working of the
national consciousness upon a stock of tradition common to all the