Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/84

76 than that of the majority of the folk-lore collections of later years. It consists of eighty-four popular tales current in Lorraine, and collected (à la Grimm) by the author and his sisters at the village of Montiers-sur-Saulx, in the department of the Meuse. M. Cosquin, who in his prefatory note disclaims any literary pretensions, has been careful, in the first place, to give the original tales in their unvarnished form, as taken down from popular recitation; then, in a chapter of "Remarques," immediately following each story and conveniently distinguished from it by the use of a smaller type, he examines each tale from the point of view of the folk-lore student, noting the parallel versions and variants that exist in various languages, and establishing (where possible) its affinities with the typical member of the Indian or radical group of folk-tales, to which most, if not all, current European popular stories may with more or less certainty be traced. Monsieur Cosquin has accomplished his self-imposed task with great ability and completeness and has made an important addition to the practical literature of European folk-lore. The reader has especial cause to be grateful to him for the unpretentious and thoroughgoing spirit in which he has treated the various questiones vexatæ incidental to his subject, without suffering himself to be led astray by the fantastic ignes fatui that have of our days misled so many able writers on popular mythology and left them too often marish-logged in the howling wildernesses of unconditioned conjecture.

A specially valuable feature of the book is the preliminary essay, in which the author discusses the question of the origin and propagation of the European Popular Tales. It is refreshing, in these days of hysterico-cosmological hypothesis run wild, to see the common-sense and practical fashion in which M. Cosquin disposes of the pseudo-scientific litter of mythical and mythico-meteorological theories with which modern folk-lore is so sadly encumbered and of which M. Max Müller and Signer A. de Gubernatis are the coryphæi tripudiantes, nor is he less justly severe upon the extravagances of the English appassionati "who profess to find in the ideas and customs of modern savages the key to the origin of our tales." He has the