NOTES 219 



withstand the Wind, as being inferior to Mice which can 

 bore into its entrails. So the Brahmin goes with her to the 

 Mouse-King. Her body became beautified by her hair 

 standing on end for joy, and she said : " Papa, make me 

 into a Mouse, and give me to him as a wife." The Indian 

 fable has exactly the same moral as the Greek one, Naturam 

 expellas. We can trace the incident of strong, stronger, 

 more strong still, and strongest, in the Talmud, while there 

 is a foreign air about the metempsychosis in the Phasdrine 

 fable. As this fable is one of the earliest known in Greece 

 before Alexander's march to India, it is an important piece 

 of evidence for the transmission of fables from the East. 

 (Cf. La Fontaine, ii. 18 ; ix. 7.) 



LXXVIL— MILKMAID AND HER PAIL. 



Has become popular through La Fontaine's Perrette. 

 Derived from India, as has been shown by Benfey in his 

 Einleitung. Panchatantra, § 209. Professor Max Miiller 

 has expanded this in his admirable essay on the Emigration 

 of Fables, Selected Essays^ i. pp. 500-576. The story of 

 Alnaschar, the Barber's Fifth Brother in the Arabian 

 Nights^ also comes from the same source. La Fontaine's 

 version, which has made the fable so familiar to us all, 

 comes from Bonaventure des Periers, Contes et Nouvelles^ 

 who got it from the Dialogus Creaturarum of Nicholaus 

 Pergamenus, who derived it from the Sermones of Jacques de 

 Vitry (see Prof. Crane's edition, no. ii.), who probably 

 derived it from the Directoriufn Humana Vitce of John 

 of Capua, a converted Jew, who translated it from the 

 Hebrew version of the Arabic Kalilah iva Dinmah, which 

 was itself derived from the old Syriac version of a Pehlevi 

 translation of the original Indian work. 



