Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/122

114 ent subject of science. Separating from the tale, for the sake of perspicuity, all the episodes and other extrinsic elements, he deals with every separate adventure consisting of a single complication and resolution. He collects and compares the variants—that is to say, all the adventures presenting the same complication and the same solution; and by doing so he believes that he is able to trace the tale back along its line of march, and ultimately to discover its birthplace. The assumption underlying this process is, that adventures in which the complication alone, or the resolution alone, is the same, may perchance be due to the homogeneity of human thought; but that a double chance—that in which the complication and the resolution are the same—is out of the question. Neither M. Jules Krohn nor his son, the learned Professor, agrees with M. Cosquin in fathering all folk-tales upon the Buddhist imagination. On the contrary. Prof. Krohn says expressly: "Stories are the product of the activity of the genius of one people, whether Indian or Egyptian, as little as our culture is due to one nation or to one race; rather they are common property, acquired by the united labour of the whole world, more civilised and less civilised alike.' At the end of a minute inquiry into the three stories comprised in his Mann und Fuchs, he comes to the conclusion that one of the three belongs to the Northern, cycle of Beast-tales, the second comes from a jackal-tale invented in Egypt, and the third is a fable belonging to that body of Greek literature which has descended to us under the name of Æsop. Prof. Krohn's study is worthy of close attention, both for its method and its results.

Both M. Cosquin and Prof. Krohn are empiricist in their treatment of folk-tales: the latter openly and avowedly so the former against his will and by the necessities of his theory. For it is a theory with this disadvantage for an advocate, that the history of every individual tale must be investigated, and the investigation must penetrate to its very roots. No amount of proof that a given number of