the higher mythologies and of artistic fiction. Thus we must not hastily generalise about many of the Breton stories, even though M. Luzel reports them. There is a notable distinction, too, between Breton and French, for which reason I have deliberately avoided much mention of native Breton songs and customs. In the matter of popular tales, however, we are not lucky enough to possess much material that is not Breton, and therefore the paper must be closed with a few remarks on the tales translated and published in Mélusine by M. Luzel. In his Le Lièvre, le Renard, et l'Ours, one easily recognises a form of the common story about "grateful beasts." The peculiarity of the Breton form is its modernism. The characters are named Henri and Hénori, and so on. They go to Paris and England, and they have adventures with rather common-place robbers. There is a touch of the usual spirit of cruel revenge, which is a mark of märchen, in the fiery punishment of the villain with which the story ends. (Mélusine, col. 64.) Les Trois Fils du Roi (Mélusine, col. 65) is a variant of Puss in Boots. Here the successful youngest son has a hump-back, but he is none the less triumphant.
In Jean de l'Ours (Mélusine 110) we have that widely-known character of legend, the man whose father is a bear. The bear occurs in Danish royal pedigrees, and he is a totem or tribal father and friend in North America. Jean de l'Ours is a creature of huge strength, who is aided in his adventures by companions who have magical gifts. One can break mountains, another break oaks, and so forth. This is a very ancient feature in primitive fiction, and its highest artistic form, as manipulated by poets, is to be found in the Greek account of the companions of Jason and the Argonautic expedition. The framers of the cycle of Argo must apparently have amplified and decorated certain data which are found, in a ruder form, among Finns and Samoyeds, as well as in the märchen of the unprogressive peasant class in European countries. A version of Jean de l'Ours is given by M. Deulin in his Contes du Roi Gambrinus, The short fantastic story from Picardy (Mélusine, col. 113) of the humpbacked man who lost his hump, and of the other deformed creature who had the lost hump added to his own protuberance, is known to exist in Japan. Hence arises a controversy; some "story-comparers "
