Teutonic epics and higher legends or sagas on the other. He also attempted to classify the stories in a certain number of recurring formulæ or plots. In Von Hahn's opinion, the stories were originally the myths of the undivided Aryan people in its central Asian home. As the different branches scattered and separated, they carried with them their common store of myths, which were gradually worn down into the detritus of popular stories, "the youngest form of the myth." The same theory appeared (in 1859) in Mr. Max Müller's Chips from a German Workshop.[1] The undivided Aryan people possessed, in its mythological and proverbial phraseology, the seeds or germs, more or less developed, which would flourish, under any sky, into very similar plants,—that is, the popular stories.
Against these ideas M. Cosquin argues, that if the Aryan people before its division preserved the myths only in their earliest germinal form, it is incredible that, when the separated branches had lost touch of each other, the final shape of their myths, the märchen, should have so closely resembled each other as they do. The Aryan theory (as it may be called for the sake of brevity) rejects, as a rule, the idea that tales can, as a rule, have been borrowed, even by one Aryan people from another.[2] "Nursery tales are generally the last things to be borrowed by one nation from another."[3] Then, says M. Cosquin, as the undivided Aryan people had only the myths in their least developed state, and
