Page:The Fables of Æsop (Jacobs).djvu/231

Rh connect a great moral teacher with the history of the fable. In the same way Buddha is represented as knowing the Wolf and Lamb fable, because he had been the Kid of the original.

In my History of the Æsopic Fable I have selected the "Wolf and the Crane" for specially full treatment; and my bibliography of its occurrences runs to over a hundred numbers, pp. 232-234. The Buddhistic form of the fable first became known to Europe in 1691 in De La Loubère's Description of Siam. It had undoubtedly reached the ancient world by two different roads: (a) As a Libyan fable which was included by Demetrius of Phaleron in his Assemblies of Æsopic Fables, circa 300 B.C., from whom Phædrus obtained it; (b) as one of the "Fables of Kybises," brought from Ceylon to Alexandria, c. 50 A.D. This form, which still retains the Lion, was used by a Rabbi, Jochanan ben Saccai, c. 120 A.D., to induce the Jews not to revolt against the Romans; this is found in the great Rabbinical Commentary on Genesis, Bereshith Rabba, c. 64.

It has been conjectured that the tradition of the Ichneumon picking the teeth of the Crocodile (Herod, ii. 68) was derived from this fable, which has always been very popular. The Greeks had a proverb, "Out of the Wolf's mouth." The fable is figured on the Bayeux tapestry (see frontispiece to my History).

In medieval prose Phædrus; also in Gabrias, a medieval derivate of Babrius, though not now extant in either Phædrus or Babrius. Certainly Indian, for as Benfey has shown, the Greek and the Latin forms together make up the original story as extant in Fables Bidpai. (See Jacobs, Indian Fairy Tales, xv.; "The Gold-giving Serpent," and