KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 291 
way credible that one of these groups of people should 
have been obliged to go to some other group to get 
its nursery tales? Or, to put the question more 
forcibly, is it at all credible that any one group should 
have been so differently constituted from the rest, in 
regard to the making of folk-lore, that it should have 
enjoyed a monopoly of this kind of invention? Yet, 
unless we feel prepared to defend some such extreme 
position as this, there appears to be nothing for us to 
do but to admit that all the Aryan people have gone on 
from the outset with their own native folk-lore. 
Here and there, no doubt, they have acquired new 
stories from one another, and the instances of such cross- 
transmission have probably been very numerous; but 
with regard to the great body of their fireside traditions 
we may Safely assert, on general principles of common 
sense, that it has been indigenous. When we find 
that not two or three but two or three thousand 
nursery-tales are common to Ireland and Russia, to 
Norway and Hindustan, we may feel pretty sure that 
the gist of these tales, their substratum of genuine 
myth, was all contained in Old Aryan folk-lore in the 
times when there was but one Old Aryan language 
and culture. 
In support of this view we have not only this gen- 
eral probability, sustained by the difficulty of adopting 
any alternative: we have also the demonstrated fact 
that the whole structure of Aryan speech, with the 
culture that it implies, however multiform it is to-day, 
has been traced back to an era of uniformity. Quite 
independently of our study of myths and legends, we 
know that there was once a time when a part of the 
common ancestors of the Englishman, the Russian, 
