Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/429

 Rh Apuleius, or exactly as in our European form, might be independently developed. Every detail in the story is either universally human, or universal in early society. That all the details should be accidentally shaken, by Red Men and Greeks, into exactly the same pattern, is beyond my belief, and the fact does not occur. But that there should be developed, without borrowing, a tale of a broken marriage taboo, and of its consequences, wherever such a taboo existed, is well within my belief. I gave an Ojibway example and a Zulu example. They are so far on the classical pattern that the central situations of the transformed husband, in Zulu, and of the broken taboo and lost bride, in Ojibway, occur. But the details, in all other respects, vary from the legend in Apuleius so much, that transmission and corruption can scarcely account for the analogy. At the same time I add, even here, that "there is also a chance" of transmission by borrowing, "in the unknown past of our scattered and wandering race." Mr. Jacobs observes that "in only two" out of some dozen of tales which I have analyzed, have I "allowed the possibility of borrowing". A man who has allowed the possibility in even two cases out of twelve (not denying it in the ten) is, of course, no foe of transmission. But Mr. Jacobs is inaccurate. In treating of "Cupid and Psyche", I repeat (Custom and Myth, p. 85, 1884), I especially allow for the chance of transmission, yet tales analogous to "Cupid and Psyche" are, I think, of all others the least unlikely to have been independently evolved. This was not meant as a "hedge", but as a scientific statement. I believe that the Zulu and Ojibway stories are not corrupted forms of the legend of "Cupid and Psyche", but I cannot dogmatise.

By the way, to suppose that a taboo may have given rise to part of a märchen, is not to maintain that, wherever this märchen is now found, there the taboo has existed. The tale might reach a people who had never possessed such a taboo. The tale merely raises a presumption that, wherever it was first developed, there a taboo was in