Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/68

 course of adjacent tribes not always hostile though alien in stock, the custom of exogamy, the enslavement or adoption of prisoners of war, are among the means by which even the most conservative and isolated of communities have been penetrated with foreign traditions. In all these cases we have the conditions fulfilled whereby alone transmission is possible.

But if the difificulties of transmission from a foreign source be great, the difificulty of testing such transmission is equally great. I have already noticed this difificulty in passing; and I recur to it simply to instance one or two tests which have been found insufficient—by no means to discuss them fully. It is not in every case that evidence can be found so distinctly pointing towards an alien origin as in that of Ali Baba. In the story of Cinderella as given by Perrault the heroine wears slippers of glass (pantoufles de verre). Glass is a material so inconvenient for shoes that rationalistic mythologists have suggested, and M. Littré in his dictionary positively asserts, that verre (glass) is a mistake for vair (fur). An examination of the variants, however, shows that M. Littré and the rationalists are quite wrong. The material was intended to be brilliant and hard. Why it should have been brilliant we need not now consider. That hardness was a quality in the original story is certain, because (though Perrault's polite version does not include the episode) we find from many of the other versions that the elder sisters actually cut their feet to fit them into the shoe, and in the end were convicted of the imposture by their blood. Nor would a hard or a heavy material be objectionable in the eyes of peasants accustomed to the clumsiness and "the clang of the wooden shoon". But although the slippers are nearly everywhere of a substance brilliant and hard, they are very rarely formed of glass; and the glass slipper has been proposed as a test of Perrault's influence over traditional versions of the story. Miss Marian Roalfe Cox, who has examined and tabulated more than a hundred and fifty variants of Cinderella, informs me that only in three instances besides Perrault's does the glass slipper appear. Of these instances two are Scottish, one from the island of South Uist, the other from the neighbourhood of Glasgow, and the third is an Irish tale from Tralee. If we examine these tales, we find that the first is a version intermediate between the English tale of