tale will be like the Indian Ocean shell
found lately in the Polish bone-cave,[107] or like the Egyptian beads
discovered in the soil of Dahomey. The story will have been carried
hither and thither, in the remotest times, to the remotest shores, by
traders, by slaves, by captives in war, or by women torn from their
own tribe and forcibly settled as wives among alien peoples.

Stories of this kind are everywhere the natural property of mothers
and grandmothers. When we remember how widely diffused is the law of
exogamy, which forbids marriage between a man and woman of the same
stock, we are impressed by the number of alien elements which must
have been introduced with alien wives. Where husband and wife, as
often happened, spoke different languages, the woman would inevitably
bring the hearthside tales of her childhood among a people of strange
speech. By all these agencies, working through dateless time, we may
account for the diffusion, if we cannot explain the origin, of tales
like the central arrangement of incidents in the career of Jason.

FOOTNOTES:

[91] _Primitive Culture_, i. 357: 'The savage sees individual stars as
animate beings, or combines star-groups into living celestial
creatures, or limbs of them, or objects connected with them.'

[92] This formula occurs among Bushmen and Eskimo (Bleek and Rink).

[93] The events of the flight are recorded correctly in the Gaelic
variant 'The Battle of the Birds.' (Campbell, _Tales of the West
Highlands_, vol. i. p. 25.)

[94] Ralston, _Russian Folk Tales_, 132; Koehler, _Orient und
Occident_, ii. 107, 114.

[95] _Ko ti ki_, p. 36.

[96] _Callaway_, pp. 51, 53, 64, 145, 228.

[97] See also 'Petrosinella' in the _Pentamerone_, and 'The
Master-maid' in Dasent's _Tales from the Norse_.

[98] _Folklore Journal_, August, 1883.

[99] _Poetae Minores Gr._, ii.

[100] _Gr. My._, ii. 318.

[101] _Sonne, Mond und Sterne_, pp. 213, 229.

[102] This proves that the tale belongs to the pre-Christian cannibal
age.

[103] Turner's _Samoa_, p. 102. In this tale only the names of the
daughters are translated; they mean 'white fish' and 'dark fish.'

[104] _Folklore Journal_, August, 1883.

[105] Schoolcraft, _Algic Researches_, ii. 94-104.

[106] The Red Indian version of the flight is given in 'The Red Horse
of the Dacotahs,' _Century Magazine_, 1884.

[107] _Nature_, March 14, 1884.

_APOLLO AND THE MOUSE._

Why is Apollo, especially the Apollo