Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/21

Rh all the beasts go to see him but the Jackal. His enemy the Hyena fetches him to give his advice, so he comes before the Lion, and says he has been to ask the witch what was to be done for his sick uncle, and the remedy is for the Lion to pull the Hyena's skin off over his ears, and put it on himself while it is warm. Again, the trick by which Chanticleer gets his head out of Reynard's mouth by making him answer the farmer, reminds one of the way in which, in the Hottentot tale, the Cock makes the Jackal say his prayers, and when the outwitted beast folds his hands and shuts his eyes, flies off and makes his escape. Of course these tales, though adapted to native circumstances and with very clever native turns, may be all of very recent introduction. Such a story as that which introduces a fish-waggon, would be naturally referred to the Dutch boers, from whom indeed all the Reynard stories are likely to have come. One curious passage tends to show that the stories are taken, not from the ancient versions of Reynard, but from some interpolated modern rendering. A proof that Jacob Grimm brings forward of the independent, secluded course of the old German Beast-Saga, is, that it did not take up into itself stories long current elsewhere, which would have fitted admirably into it,—thus, for instance, Æsop's story of the Fox who will not go into the Lion's den because he only sees the footsteps going in, but none coming out, is nowhere to be found in the mediæval Reynard. But we find in the Hottentot tales that this very episode has found its way in, and exactly into its fitting place. "The Lion, it is said, was ill, and they all went to see him in his suffering. But the Jackal did not go, because the traces of the people who went to see him did not turn back."

As it happens, we know from other sources enough to explain the appearance in South Africa of stories from Reynard and the Arabian Nights by referring them to European or Moslem influence. But even without such knowledge, the tales themselves prove an historical connexion, near or remote, between Europe, Egypt, and South Africa. To try to make such evidence stand alone is a more ambitious task. In a chapter on the Geographical Distribution of Myths, I have compared a series of stories collected on the American Continent with their