1885.] Rev. C. Swynnerton — A coincidence in Folk-lore. 99 



going up the stream." " Ah, Sir," 



answered the wretched Baneyri, 



" you did not know that wife of 



mine. She always took an oppo- 

 site course to every body else. 



And, even now that she is drowned, 



I know full well that if other 



bodies have floated down the river 



hers must have floated up ! " 



Poggio, for his day, was a great traveller, having visited most of the 

 courts of Europe including that of England, so it is difficult to say 

 whether he picked up the story in Italy or elsewhere. In Europe, how- 

 ever, it certainly existed as a household tale in the fifteenth century, and 

 here in the nineteenth it re-appears on the Upper Indus. It is not often 

 that in folk-tales a collector discovers a resemblance so exactly marked, 

 though I possess several, hitherto unpublished, almost as striking in 

 their apparent identity ; and the conclusion which seems forced upon the 

 mind from a comparison of these various stories is not so much that 

 they owe their similarity to an accidental coincidence in thought or 

 inspiration among peoples living far apart, like those undesigned coin- 

 cidences which are also to be observed in the works of great writers and 

 even composers, but rather that they can trace their original source to 

 some common tribe or family of men, whether in Central Asia or else- 

 where, whose descendants, extending themselves east and west over the 

 world, carried their household words with them. To those who have 

 made a special study of this fascinating branch of learnin^>ihis is the 

 theory which appears to commend itself, so that what is historically true 

 of language in general, is likewise true of those simple tales in which 

 are preserved the primitive deposits of the human imagination. 



