This kind of reasoning is only too common, when the object is to show that India was the birthplace of any widely diffused popular fiction. In India, people argue, this or that tale has a moral. Among Celts and Kamschatkans it has no moral. But certain stories did undeniably come from India in literary works, like the stories of Sindibad. Therefore this or that story also came from India, dropping its moral on the way. Did we like this sort of syllogism, we might boldly assert that Puss in Boots was originally a heroic myth of an Arab tribe with a gazelle for Totem. But we like not this kind of syllogism. The purpose of this study of Puss in Boots is to show that, even when a tale has probably been invented but once, in one place, and has thence spread over a great part of the world, the difficulty of finding the original centre is perhaps insuperable. At any time a fresh discovery may be made. Puss may turn up in some hitherto unread manuscript of an old missionary among Mexicans or Peruvians[66].
[52] George Cruikshank had also turned Hop o' My Thumb and Cinderella into temperance tracts. See Cruikshank's Fairy Library, G. Bell and Sons.
[53] The French version is in M. Charles Deulin's Contes du Roi Gambrinus. The German (Grimm, 64) omits the story of the exchanges, but ends like Jean Gogué. The Zulu is in Dr. Callaway's Inzinganekwane, pp. 38-40.
[54] Wide-awake Stories. A collection of tales told by little children, between sunset and sunrise, in the Punjaub and Kashmir. Steel and Temple, London, 1884, p. 26.
[55] Andree, Die Anthropophagie, 'Überlebsel im Volksglauben.' Leipzig, 1887.
[56] Causeries du Lundi, December 29, 1851.
[57] Schol. ad. Theog. 885.
[58] Thorpe's Palace with Pillars of Gold.
[59] Dasent's Lord Peter.
[60] Piacevoli Notti, xi. 1, Venice, 1562. Crane's Italian Popular Tales, p. 348.