question whether justice or injustice, truth or falsehood, pays better, or over some religious question, and lay a wager upon it. A decision is given against the person with whom the audience is expected to sympathize, for instance, the champion of justice. The blinded man, or the loser of the wager, becomes a beggar and undergoes various adventures: among others, he overhears certain animals, or demoniacal personages, discussing subjects in which he at once becomes interested—his own misfortune, a cure for blindness, or for some disease under which another person is labouring, a hidden treasure and the means to recover it, etc. Following the directions given, he recovers his sight, heals the other person of disease, obtains the treasure and becomes wealthy. The other man learns of his good fortune and endeavours to imitate him by listening to the conversation of the animals or demons at the same place, but is discovered by them and punished for spying. The former man is therefore vindicated and the latter comes to a bad end.
Without committing himself to Benfey’s general theory that all folk-tales come from India, the author finds the earliest recorded variants of the tale in India, where also the various motives and incidents are found in other connections, and traces it from India into Europe, by two routes, a southern route, in which the form originating in the quarrel as to the comparative merits of justice and injustice or the religious question, is mainly followed, and a northern route through Russia, in which the more primitive motive of the purchase of food by the loss of the unfortunate man’s eyes is predominant. The former type, the author concludes, was domesticated in Europe by the Crusades; the latter penetrated at some earlier but undefinable period from Mongolian sources, and is on the whole more widely spread. These two streams often mingle, and the incidents get into other stories, while on the other hand incidents from other stories are frequently incorporated. The author finds his way through this almost inextricable tangle with ingenuity and patience; and the result is a very interesting discussion. He assumes that the complicated plot and structure require that the tale must have originated in some one place and cannot have arisen independently among different peoples,
