grandfather, and all the titles just mentioned have been united in his line ever since. (j. ga.)
TALBOT, William Henry Fox (1800-1877), a discoverer in photography, was the only child of William Davenport Talbot, of Laycock Abbey, Wilts, and of Lady Elizabeth Fox Strangways, daughter of the second earl of Ilchester. He was born in February 1800, and educated at Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained the Porson prize in 1820, and graduated as twelfth wrangler in 1821. From 1822 to 1872 he frequently communicated papers to the Royal Society, many of them on mathematical subjects. At an early period he had begun his optical researches, which were to have such important results in connexion with photography. To the Edinburgh Journal of Science in 1826 he contributed a paper on "Some Experiments on Coloured Flame"; to the Quarterly Journal of Science in 1827 a paper on "Monochromatic Light"; and to the Philosophical Magazine a number of papers on chemical subjects, including one on "Chemical Changes of Colour." Before Daguerre exhibited in 1839 pictures taken by the sun, Talbot had obtained similar success, and as soon as Daguerre’s discoveries were whispered communicated the results of his experiments to the Royal Society (see Photography, vol. xviii. p. 824). In 1841 he made known his discovery of the calotype process, but after the discovery of the collodion process by Scott Archer, with whom he had a lawsuit in reference to his patent rights, he relinquished this field of inquiry. For his discoveries, the narrative of which is detailed in his Pencil of Nature (1844), he received in 1842 the medal of the Royal Society. While engaged in his scientific researches he devoted a considerable portion of his time to archaeology, and this field of inquiry latterly occupied his chief attention. Besides reading papers on these subjects before the Royal Society of Literature and the Society of Biblical Archaeology, he published Hermes, or Classical and Antiquarian Researches (1838–39), and Illustrations of the Antiquity of the Book of Genesis (1839). With Sir Henry Rawlinson and Dr Hincks he shares the honour of having been one of the first decipherers of the cuneiform inscriptions of Nineveh. He was also the author of English Etymologies (1846). He died at Laycock Abbey, 17th September 1877.
TALCA, a town of Chili, capital of the province of Talca, is situated on the Claro, a tributary of the Maule, nearly due south of Santiago, with which it is connected by rail. The town has a lyceum and some woollen manufactures (especially of "ponchos"). In 1875 the population numbered 17,496, and in 1885 about 19,000.
TALENT. See Numismatics, vol. xvii. p. 631.
TALES are, in the usual acceptance of the word, fictitious narratives, long or short, ancient or modern. In this article "tale" is used in a stricter sense, as equivalent to the German "Volks-märchen" or the French "conte populaire." Thus understood, popular tales mean the stories handed down by oral tradition from an unknown antiquity, among savage and civilized peoples. So understood, popular tales are a subject in mythology, and indeed in the general study of the development of man, of which the full interest and importance is scarcely yet recognized. Popular tales won their way into literature, it is true, at a very distant period. The Homeric epics, especially the Odyssey, contain adventures which are manifestly parts of the general human stock of popular narrative. Other examples are found in the Rigveda, and in the myths which were handled by the Greek dramatists. Collections of popular tales, more or less subjected to conscious literary treatment, are found in Sanskrit, as in the work of Somadeva, whose Kathá Sarit Ságara, or "Ocean of the Streams of Story," has been translated by Mr Tawney (Calcutta, 1880). The Thousand and One Nights (q.v.) are full of popular tales, and popular tales are the staple of the mediæval Gesta Romanorum, and of the collections of Straparola and other Italian conteurs. In all these and similar gatherings the story, long circulated from mouth to mouth among the people, is handled with conscious art, and little but the general outline of plot and character of incident can be regarded as original. In the Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé of Perrault (Elzevir, Amsterdam, 1697; the Parisian edition is of the same date) we have one of the earliest gatherings of tales which were taken down in their nursery shape as they were told by nurses to children. This at least seems probable, though M. Alfred Maury thinks Perrault drew from literary sources. Perrault attributed the composition to his son, P. Darmaucour, at that time a child, and this pretext enabled him to give his stories in a simple and almost popular guise. In the dedication signed by the boy, Perrault offers remarks which really do throw a certain light on the origin and characteristics of "märchen." He says, "Ils renferment tons une morale très sensée . . . . . et donnent une image de ce qui se passe dans les moindres families, où la louable impatience d’instruire les enfans fait imaginer des histoires dépourvûes de raison pour s’accomoder à ces mêmes enfants, qui n’en ont pas encore." It seems that popular tales in many cases probably owe their origin to the desire of enforcing a moral or practical lesson. It appears that their irrational and "infantile" character—"dépourvûes de raison"—is derived from their origin, if not actually among children, at least among childlike peoples, who have not arrived at "raison," that is, at the scientific and modern conception of the world and of the nature of man.
The success of Perrault’s popular tales brought the genre into literary fashion, and the Comtesse d’Aulnoy invented, or in some cases adapted, "contes," which still retain a great popularity. But the precise and scientific collection of tales from the lips of the people is not much earlier than our century. The chief impulse to the study was given by the brothers Grimm. The first edition of their Kinder- und Haus-Märchen was published in 1812. The English reader will find a very considerable bibliography of popular tales, as known to the Grimms, in Mrs Alfred Hunt’s translation, Grimm's Household Tales, with Notes (London, 1884). "How unique was our collection when it first appeared," they exclaim, and now merely to enumerate the books of such traditions would occupy much space. In addition to the marchen of Indo-European peoples, the Grimms' became acquainted with some Malay stories, some narratives of Bechuanas, Negroes, American Indians, and Finnish, Esthonian, and Magyar stories. Thus the Grimms’ knowledge of non-European märchen was extremely slight. It enabled them, however, to observe the increase of refinement "in proportion as gentler and more humane manners develop themselves," the monstrosities of Finnish and Red-Indian fancy gradually fading in the narratives of Germans and Italians. The Grimms notice that the evolution of popular narrative resembles the evolution of the art of sculpture, from the South-Sea idol to the frieze of the Parthenon, "from the strongly marked, thin, even ugly, but highly expressive forms of its earliest stages to those which possess external beauty of mould." Since the Grimms’ time our knowledge of the popular tales of non-European races has been greatly enriched. We possess numbers of North-American, Brazilian, Zulu, Swahili, Eskimo, Samoan, Maori, Kaffir, Malagasy, Bushman, and even Australian märchen, and can study them in comparison with the stories of Hesse, of the West Highlands of Scotland, of Scandinavia.
