issued separately. Sets of tales from Southern India, collected by the Pandit Natesa Sastri, have been issued under the title Folk-Lore of Southern India, three fascicules of which have been recently re-issued by Mrs. Kingscote under the title, Tales of the Sun (W. H. Allen, 1891): it would have been well if the identity of the two works had been clearly explained. The largest addition to our knowledge of the Indian folk-tale that has been made since Wideawake Stories is that contained in Mr. Knowles' Folk-Tales of Kashmir (Trübner's Oriental Library, 1887), sixty-three stories, some of great length. These, with Mr. Campbell's Santal Tales (1892); Ramaswami Raju's Indian Fables (London, Sonnenschein, n.d.); M. Thornhill, Indian Fairy Tales (London, 1889); and E. J. Robinson, Tales of S. India (1885), together with those contained in books of travel like Thornton's Bannu or Smeaton's Karens of Burmah bring up the list of printed Indian folk-tales to over 350—a respectable total indeed, but a mere drop in the the ocean of the stream of stories that must exist in such a huge population as that of India: the Central Provinces in particular are practically unexplored. There are doubtless many collections still unpublished. Col. Lewin has large numbers, besides the few published in his Lushai Grammar; and Mr. M. L. Dames has a number of Baluchi tales which I have been privileged to use. Altogether, India now ranks among the best represented countries for printed folk-tales, coming only after Russia (1500), Germany (1200), Italy and France (1000 each.)[1] Counting the ancient with the modern, India has probably some 600 to 700 folk-tales printed and translated in accessible form. There should be enough material to determine the vexed question of the relations between the European and the Indian collections.
This question has taken a new departure with the researches of M. Emanuel Cosquin in his Contes populaires de Lorraine (Paris, 1886, 2 tirage, 1890), undoubtedly the most important contribution to the scientific study of the folk-tale since the Grimms. M. Cosquin gives in the annotations to the eighty-four tales which he has collected in Lorraine a mass of information as to the various forms which the tales take in other countries of Europe and in the East. In my opinion, the work he has done for the European folk-tale is even more valuable than the conclusions he draws from it as to the relations with India. He has taken up the work which Wilhelm Grimm dropped in 1859, and shown from the huge accumulations of folk-tales that have appeared during the last thirty years that there is a common fund of folk-tales which
- ↑ Finland boasts of 12,000, but most of these lie imprinted among the archives of the Helsingfors Literary Society.
