of philological science, which regards the identity of language among the Aryans as due to borrowing, and we are scarcely at liberty to make an assumption of so early a case of story barter, when later borrowing will equally well explain the resemblance. The Greek version of the tale as we have it can scarcely be the original from which all others have been derived, since one of the most marked of the common incidents, that of the obstacles to pursuit, is only represented in the Greek version by the dismemberment of Apsyrtos. This brutal device is clearly a primitive trait, but it has disappeared in all the other European versions. Mr. Nutt has ingeniously pointed out that the three obstacles which are common to the Norse and to the Celtic variants of the story have a distinct Teutonic appearance, since they recall the mountain, lake, and forest which among the Teutons separate the other world from this. A working hypothesis to account for the spread through Europe, at any rate, would be to assume that the Greek story in the early form, not in that derived from Apollonius, got among the outlying posts of the Roman Empire in Germany, and was there interpolated with the specific Teutonic conception of hell, but this will not account for its spread in extra-European regions.
India would assist us as a center of dispersion, if we could find the tale in all its incidents in the peninsula. Thence it could have spread to Madagascar and Zululand, on the one hand, and to Japan and Samoa on the other; but the only Indian form with which I am acquainted, that given in the thirty-ninth chapter of the Kathásarit Ságara does not contain the obstacles to flight in the form required to explain this spread. The Rakshasa's daughter, who is the Indian analogue of Medeia, does not throw out obstacles to her father's pursuit, but transforms herself and misleads him as to the path taken by the lovers; she even induces her father to believe he is dead, so that he has to go home to inquire whether this is a fact. But it is the comb we want
