attention to the fact that he did appreciate certain essential features of the problem before us.
The publication by our Society in 1893 of the variants of the tale of Cinderella collected by Miss M. E. Roalfe Cox, gave occasion for the discussion to break out anew. In his Introduction to that work, Mr. Andrew Lang maintained that similar institutions and a similar imaginative condition may give rise to similarities in tales, and even to some combinations of incidents; at a certain point, where the incidents are numerous and the sequence exact, he disbelieved in independent invention. He writes: “I have disclaimed any theory about the original Home, or the diffusion of the tales. I have frequently shown the many ways in which a tale, once conceived, might be diffused or transmitted. It might be carried by women, compelled, by the law of exogamy, to marry into an alien group. It might be carried by slaves all across Africa, and, in old times, to America. A slave of Javan might tell a Greek tale among Phoenicians or Assyrians. Soldiers of Alexander might carry them to Egypt. . . . Tales might come and go, north and south, with the amber on the Sacred Way. How tales known in the Old World could be carried to the Huarochiris, subjects of the Incas, or to Samoa, and there get incrusted in the sacred national myths, entirely puzzles me, nor can I very readily see how a whole mass of our tales came to be diffused among Zulus and Bushmen, Red Indians and Eskimo. But ‘anything might happen in the great backward time,’ as Aristotle says. I do not deny that such diffusion and transmission is possible. . . . In fact, I am obliged to say that I know not how the stories are so similar, for transmission to the Western Pacific coast from India, Africa, or Europe is difficult to accept. But the backward of time and the possibilities of migration are infinite.” In referring to the tale of Cupid and Psyche, he adds, “Incidents were either universally human, like Psyche’s jealous sisters, or were suggested by nuptial taboos
