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xxviii Joseph Derenbourg. Thus, by a curious coincidence, as the Jews were the chief agents in the spontaneous spread of the Fables, so Jewish scholars have done most for the scientific study of that spread.

Owing to this learned diffusion of the Fables, it has come about that, within the last hundred years, no less than twenty English translations of various versions of Bidpai's Fables have been published. Of these, fourteen are from various Indian offshoots (for which see Mr. Rhys-Davids' Table I.), of which the most important are the Hitopadesa, of which there are five English versions, and Somadeva's Katha-sarit-sagara, or Ocean of the River of Tales. Besides these we have Knatchbull's translation of the Arabic, Eastwick's and Wollaston's versions of the Persian Anvari Suhaili, besides J. Taylor's translation of the French version of its first four chapters, which is interesting as being the first work with