[29.] Curtius, Verbum, p. 72.
[30.] Pott, E. F., 1871, p. 21.
[31.] Dr. Callaway, in his Remarks on the Zulu Language (1870), p. 2, says: “The Zulu Language contains upwards of 20,000 words in bonâ fide use among the people. Those curious appellations for different colored cattle, or for different maize cobs, to express certain minute peculiarities of color or arrangement of color, which it is difficult for us to grasp, are not synonymous, but instances in which a new noun or name is used instead of adding adjectives to one name to express the various conditions of an object. Neither are these various verbs used to express varieties of the same action, synonyms, such as ukupata, to carry in the hand, ukwetshata, to carry on the shoulder, ukubeleta, to carry on the back.”
[32.] Bruppacher, Lantlere der Oskischen Sprache, p. 48. Büchler, Grundriss der Lateinischen Declination, p. 1.
[33.] “Die Entstehung der Casus ist noch das allerdunkelste im weiten Bereich des indogermanischen Formensystems.” Curtius, Chronologie, p. 71.
[34.] Corssen, ii. 888.
[35.] Cf. Clemm, Die neusten Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der Griechischen Composita, p. 9.
[ III.]
ON THE MIGRATION OF FABLES.
A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION,
ON FRIDAY, JUNE 3, 1870.
“Count not your chickens before they be hatched,” is a well-known proverb in English, and most people, if asked what was its origin, would probably appeal to La Fontaine’s delightful fable, La Laitière et le Pot au Lait.[1] We all know Perrette, lightly stepping along from her village to the town, carrying the milk-pail on her head, and in her day-dreams selling her milk for a good sum, then buying a hundred eggs, then selling the chickens, then buying a pig, fattening it, selling it again, and buying a cow with a calf. The calf frolics about, and kicks up his legs—so does Perrette, and, alas! the pail falls down, the milk is spilt, her riches gone, and she only hopes when she comes home that she may escape a flogging from her husband.
Did La Fontaine invent this fable? or did he merely follow the example of Sokrates, who, as we know from the Phædon,[2] occupied himself in prison, during the last days of his life, with turning into verse some of the fables, or, as he calls them, the myths of Æsop.