Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/121

Rh a summary of M. Cosquin's answer to the anthropological school.

M. Cosquin begins by defining his position as regards Mr. Lang. The latter, he says, studies the stories chiefly from the psychological point of view. His researches are directed to discovering what may have given birth to the ideas, more or less grotesque, which constitute the elements of the stories. He is thus rather occupied with the ideas than the tales into which they are wrought. M. Cosquin's own point of view is quite different. He only inquires whether it be possible to discover whence all these tales, common to the European nations, have obtained their actual form. Not troubling himself about the origin of the materials—the different elements which have entered into the fabrication of this or that type of the tale—he takes the finished fabric, and, finding it everywhere, with its characteristic combinations, he asks himself if there has not been somewhere a great centre of production—a great factory which has been able, thanks to favouring circumstances, to palm off its wares on well-nigh the whole world. To M. Cosquin the mint-mark of this great factory is visible on all its productions; and his quarrel with Mr. Lang is that the latter neglects it in favour of general ideas. The factory itself, as we know, M. Cosquin places in India; and he re-argues his thesis with an ability and determination that must compel his opponents to hear him and to consider the arguments he advances.

Professor Kaarle Krohn read also at Paris an exposition of his late father, M. Jules Krohn's method of investigating the provenance of folk-tales. An abstract of this exposition appears by way of introduction to his study of the fable of the fox who helps a man out of danger from another animal and is repaid with ingratitude, and of the fable of the man who hides a fox, or hare, from his pursuers and denies in words that he has seen him, but makes signs disclosing his whereabouts. Prof Krohn, like M. Cosquin, pleads for the folk-tale as itself an independ-