through the German, Greek, Italian, Servian, Roumanian, Lithuanian, and Indian myth and folk-tale areas. These formulas were translated and adapted by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould in an appendix to Henderson's Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England (London, 1866), and he expanded them into fifty-two formulæ. Those were the days when Max Müller's solar and lunar explanations of myths were in the ascendant and Mr. Baring-Gould applied his views to the explanation of folk tales. I have myself expanded Hahn's and Baring-Gould's formulæ into a list of seventy-two given in the English Folk-Lore Society's Hand-Book of Folk-Lore, London, 1891 (repeated in the second edition, 1912).
Meanwhile the erudition of Theodor Benfey, in his introduction to the Indian story book, Pantschatantra (Leipzig, 1859), had suggested another explanation of the similarities of European folk-tales. For many of the incidents and several of the complete tales Benfey showed Indian parallels, and suggested that the stories had originated in India and had been transferred by oral tradition to the different countries of Europe. This entirely undermined the mythological theories of the Grimms and Max Müller and considerably reduced the importance of folk tales as throwing light upon the primitive psychology of the Aryan peoples. Benfey's researches were followed up by E. Cosquin who, in the elaborate notes to his Contes de Lorraine, Paris, 1886, largely increased the evidence both for the common European popularity of many of the tales and incidents as well as for the parallels to be found in Oriental collections.
Still a third theory to account for the similarity of folktale incidents was started by James A. Farrer and elaborated by Andrew Lang in connection with the general movement initiated by Sir Edward Tylor to explain mythology and superstition by the similar processes of savage psychology at definite stages of primitive culture. In introductions to
