he fails to find any very exact parallels in the European area which, at that time, was very little explored. He finds the nearest parallel in Wuk, No. 25, but this is by no means a full variant of the other European tales and may have even been "contaminated" from the East. Benfey notices the Saga parallel but goes so far as even to claim this as being influenced by Eastern stories. Since his time a much closer parallel has been found in Kashmir by Knowles' Folk Tales of Kashmir, pages 484-90, repeated in Indian Fairy Tales, No. xxiv., "Why the Fish Laughed." But the parallelism here extends only to the cleverness of the girl and the ingenuity of her answers to the riddles, not to the actual plot of the story which is so uniform in Europe. Altogether we must reject Benfey's contention, at any rate for this particular story.
XXIV. THUMBKIN
I have followed, for the most part, Bolte's reconstruction, which practically consists of a combination of Grimm, 37 and 45. But in combining the two I have found it necessary to omit sections D and E of Bolte's formula which form the beginning of Grimm, 45, "Thumbkin as Journeyman."
The notion of a baby the size of a doll might be regarded as "universally human"; even the Greeks knew of manikins no bigger than their thumbs and weighing not more than an obolus (Athenæus, xii., 77); there is an epigram of the same subject in the Greek Anthology, ii., 350. But the particular adventures of Thumbkin are so consistently identical throughout Europe, especially with regard to the adventures in the cow's stomach, that it is impossible to consider the stories as independent. Cosquin, 53, has more difficulty than usual in finding real parallels in the Orient. In England, of course, Thumbkin is known as Tom Thumb
