r 
Proceedings 41 
which are laid on a stone,t as no man has speech with them. 
Sometimes however they are intoxicated with wine which has 
been mixed with the milk. They will then give medical advice, 
or will teach their captors how to make butter and cheese. Others 
help in agricultural operations. Once the spring from which a 
Geissler drank was filled with cherry-brandy by the villagers. 
They lay in wait, caught him dead drunk and locked him up, 
or in another version beheaded him. 
In these tales, which seem to me to give a vivid and scarcely 
exaggerated picture of the relations between the last semi-human 
or at least savage refugees in the Alpine fastnesses and the in- 
telligent settlers in the valleys, we find features common to the 
Centaurs, Cyclopes and Satyrs. We even find in the Engadine 
a variant of the well-known story how Odysseus tricked the 
Cyclops by calling himself Oufis or ‘Noman.’ In the German 
version the ambiguous word is Se/b. Here of course the influ- 
ence of the Odyssey is quite possible. 
Mannhardt, one of the chief exponents of the theory which 
interprets primitive tales as nature-myths, seeks to find an ex- 
planation of all these stories in natural phenomena, such as 
weather, vegetation, etc. A generation has passed since he wrote, 
and folk-lorists are no longer so ready to find a universal key 
in nature-myths. There is a tendency to look for a basis of fact 
in many quarters where the school of Max Miiller saw the 
poetic faculty humanizing inanimate nature. 
However, one slight but singular detail led Mannhardt to 
suggest dubiously ‘the effect upon the tales of a real recollection 
of the aboriginal savages.” The wild women of Central and N. 
Europe are often described as having long and pendulous breasts, 
and in Sweden the troll-wife, one of this class, hangs hers over 
her shoulders. This, as Mannhardt notes, is actually done by 
some of the Australian black women. Is not this just such a 
grotesque and uncanny fact as might impress itself on the fancy 
and memory of the immigrants ?] 
+ Cf. the hairy ‘lubber-fiend’ and his ‘cream-bowl duly set’ in LZ’ A/le- 
gro, also the Scottish Browzze. 
+ This physical peculiarity is perhaps not very rare. It was indeed 
observed by Lithgow in Ireland in 1619, and has since been noted in 
New Britain, Tasmania, etc. See G. L. Gomme, Ethnology in Folklore, 
