hold that the tale is an Aryan one, carried to Japan from the West by traders, soldiers, or missionaries. As the Japanese legend, however, occurs in a chap-book, as a legendary explanation of a Japanese proverb, it seems to have a natural root in the soil. It is easy to see how, human nature being what it is, identical proverbs may thus spring up in nations without being borrowed. Then a tale to explain the proverb is called for, and thus the same story might be found in France and Japan, or in the planet Venus for that matter, if mortals like us inhabit the planet Venus. The ordinary theory about the transmission of Aryan märchen is thwarted by the extreme savagery of certain incidents found in the nursery tales of polished nations. There are the marks of fetishism, magic, and cannibalism in our own nursery legends, and, if these originally came from India, that country must either have been peopled by savages at the time when the stories were invented, or the märchen fell in Europe among savages who corrupted them. This prevalence of savage survivals among märchen, however, is only one of several facts, which I attempted to systematise in an article on Myths and Fairy Tales (Fortnightly Review, May 1872). This is not the place to go more deeply into the evidences. M. Luzel's story of "The Tailor and the Hurricane" is a humorous version of the well-known märchen of the mule that produced gold, and of the stick that automatically beat its master's enemies. When the Tailor goes to the home of the Winds, like Odysseus to the home of Æolus, the Hurricane comes in and as good as says:
I smell the blood of an Englishman;"
or,
"Je sens odeur de Chrétien; il y a un Chrétien ici, et il faut que je le mange.
Had Æschylus any similar Greek story of ogres who smell out man's blood in his mind when he made the Eumenides detect Orestes and cry:
"Ὀσμή βροτείων ἁιμάτων με προσγελᾷ?"
(Eumenides, 244.) Another Breton story, also humorous, and even broad in its gauloiserie, is Les Trois Frères, ou le Chat, le Coq,
