Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/126

 118 travesty of an Egyptian myth developed in India"! In emphatically repudiating this "explanation", Mr. Clouston, as most readers of this review will be glad to learn, states his belief that the identities found in savage folk-lore with the mythologies of ancient nations and the folk-lore of modern Europe and Asia, are impossible to explain by any theory of transmission, and therefore "have been independently developed by widely different and widely separated races in similar conditions of life, and having more or less similar modes of thought".

Herr Marx has studied with great care and acuteness the literary history of ancient Greek folk-tales concerning Grateful Beasts. The chief animals dealt with are the dolphin, eagle, stork, lion, dog, horse, elephant, and snake. The last-named is studied with special fulness, and should not be overlooked by any one interested in the relations of snakes with the spirits of the dead. The author is by no means a partisan of the Buddhist origin of the Grateful Beast; on the contrary, he maintains, in opposition even to Benfey, that the fable of the Lion and the Mouse originated in Greece, and migrated to India, where the lion's part is played by an elephant.

The preceding paragraphs had all been written when Mr. Douglas Hyde's Beside the Fire was issued. The key-note of Dr. Hyde's work is struck in one of his opening-pages. "The folk-lore of Ireland", he says, "remains practically unexploited and ungathered. Attempts have been made from time to time during the present century to collect Irish folk-lore, but these attempts, though interesting from a literary point of view, are not always successes from a scientific one." The attempt before us is on scientific lines. It consists of fifteen stories, six of which are given in their native Irish, with translations opposite, according to the plan adopted by Campbell and Maclnnes; and the remainder are from an Irish work by the same author previously published. All of them are chosen "on account of their dissimilarity to any published Highland tales, for, as