—and for him alone. Luckily, bibliographical work, which is so necessary but so dry, needs only to be done once if done well, and the work in this case has been done admirably by the late Mr. Keith-Falconer in the introduction to his translation of the later Syriac version of “Bidpai’s Fables” (Cambridge, Pitt Press, 1885).[1] I have endeavoured to summarise the seventy erudite pages which he has taken to enumerate the various translations and editions in the accompanying genealogical table. From this I calculate that the tales have been translated into thirty-eight languages, in 112 different versions, which have passed into about 180 editions.
We must not, however, dismiss the earlier stages of the history of the Fables so summarily. In these days, research after paternity in such matters is encouraged rather than forbidden in the code of scholarship. In the present instance,
- ↑ A less complete enumeration is given in Table II., attached to Mr. T. Rhys Davids’ translation of the Jataka Tales (Trübner, 1880). Table I. deals with the Indian variants with greater fulness than in Mr. Keith-Falconer’s work. I have included some of these, as well as a few unconsidered trifles that had escaped the notice of these two scholars in Schultens, Graesse, the British Museum Catalogue, and Landau, Quellen des Decamerone.
