Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/12

 6 Who shall classify all its very queer fish, and who shall decide the course of their evolution and differentiation? I would not be discouraging to labourers in this field, and yet, when I look at the tables and analyses, it is rather despair than hope that animates me. Among these innumerable forms and shapes of fancy I seem to see that the elements are comparatively few, that the myriads of forms are the result of a few elements in infinite combinations. Is it impossible to exhaust these elements? I occasionally dream, most of us who dabble in the matter do, of some new analysis, some swift and royal road to truth.

It appears that we do not yet know how far to discern between recently borrowed stories, when we meet them among alien peoples, Red, Black, or Yellow, and stories which are older than the recent visits from Europeans. How are we ever to get over this initial difficulty? Our only certainties we win, when a nation has a literature. The nursery tales in Egyptian MSS. are, at all events, not of later date in Egypt than the age of those MSS. themselves. More we cannot say. We cannot maintain that they came from India, of which we know nothing at the time of the second Rameses, nor that they were indigenous to Egyptian soil, nor that they floated, like the golden and fragrant hair of the wife of Bitiou, down the Nile from Central Africa. We merely note that, even fifteen hundred years before our era, the elements of tales current in our nurseries had already been interwoven with the official mythology and the popular religion of Egypt. Now we may affirm that imported tales would not instantly and hastily be blended with the stories of native and local gods. Beyond that, all is conjecture. If we could read the MSS. of the old Aztecs, and if in them we found nursery tales like ours, we could then be sure that they were not derived from the Spanish conquerors nor from later European visitors. But we cannot read the Aztec MSS. The nearest we get to indubitably old American märchen is the scanty collection of Huarochiri tales, printed by the Hakluyt Society. In