290 KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 
Some scholars think that we may account in this 
way for the greater part of the resemblances among 
folk-tales in different parts of Europe, and in support 
of their opinion they allege the immense popularity, in 
the Middle Ages, of the versions of the Pantcha 
Tantra and the Seven Wise Masters. But such an 
opinion seems based on altogether too narrow a view 
of the subject. In the first place, the stories which 
have come into Europe through the Seven Wise Mas- 
ters and the versions of the Pantcha Tantra are but a 
drop in the bucket, when compared with the vast 
mythical lore which has been taken down from the 
lips of the common people within the last fifty years. 
For the greater part of this mythical lore no imagin- 
able literary source can be pointed out. Inthe second 
place, however practicable this theory of what we may 
call “lateral transmission” might seem if applied only 
to one legend, like the story of the donkey and his 
friends, above cited, it breaks down utterly when we 
try to apply it to the entire folk-lore of any one people. 
Granting that the Scotch and Irish Kelts may have 
learned this particular story from some German source, 
we have yet to remember that four-fifths of Scoto-Irish 
folk-lore is essentially similar to the folk-lore of Ger- 
many; and shall we say that Scotch and Irish nurses 
never told nursery tales until they were instructed, in 
some way or other, from a German source? We seem 
here to get very near to a veductio ad absurdum ; but 
the case is made immeasurably worse when we reflect 
that it is not with two or three but with twenty or 
thirty different Aryan peoples, and throughout more 
than a hundred distinct areas, that this remarkable 
community of popular tradition occurs. Is it in any 
