bride every day during a whole year, in order that he may find one as good as the Brahman's. If the Minister on any day fails to bring a girl he will be put to death with all his family. The Minister carries out his daily task till one day he fails to find a girl with the requisite qualifications, namely, noble, of perfect beauty, and under ten years of age. He confides his trouble to his family, whereupon his daughter offers to go herself. The father somewhat brutally says: 'That's all very well for to-day, but what will happen to-morrow and the following days?' The girl replies: 'Do not distress yourself, I mean to end this affair.' While the girl is waiting to be ushered in to the King, and is surrounded by the ladies and servants of the Court, she suggests that they should tell stories to keep themselves awake. They all refuse, so she begins one herself. In the middle the King enters and is enchanted, and on the next day he says that he wishes the same girl to be brought again; and thus she continues her stories indefinitely. There is no question here of putting the girls to death; they are merely dismissed, and it is the Minister who runs the risk.

The theory has, therefore, been adduced that the later Aryan story-tellers in order to satisfy Indian taste, turned the story round, and in the place of a Princess choosing a husband after rejecting many suitors, they introduced a powerful King, who at length chooses a bride among a large number of women. This was, of course, a dull story by comparison with the winning of the Princess's favour, and thus probably came into existence the Bluebeard theme, of the sanguinary King and the Princess who saves her life by her never-ending stories. We may tremble with excitement for her, as we do for the threatened suitors. On the other hand, this ruthless murdering of the Brides has been attributed to the vindictiveness of a King who having been in some way betrayed by a woman was determined to avoid a recurrence of such a misadventure. It is, however, quite likely that the story originated in something less brutal, namely, that the wives perished from the poison in the King's breath. The familiar quotation from Hudibras : The Prince of Cambay's daily food Is Aspe and Basilisk and Toad,'

refers to one of the Kings of Gujarat who had so saturated himself with poisons and drugs that it was said of him that if a fly settled on him and stung him it immediately fell dead; and that on account of his poisonous breath his wives perished from his embraces. It has also been suggested that he indulged in these poisons in order to make himself immune from attempts to poison him, and if we go a step further, and suppose that one of his wives had tried to poison him, we seem to arrive at the origin of the Bluebeard legion.

In connexion with this topic Mr Penzer has contributed to Volume Two a most interesting appendix which he entitles Poison-Damsels,' and, in the course of thirty-seven pages, has brought together stories bearing on this motif from all over the world. One of the most interesting is the famous story of Alexander the Great and the warning he received from Aristotle regarding the danger of death from the embraces of a beautiful maiden who had been brought up on poison until her nature had become as poisonous as that of a snake.* The story occurs originally in the famous 'Secretum Secretorum,' a Latin work, translated from the Arabic, which appeared in European literature about the very time that Somadeva wrote. It purported to be a collection of the most important and secret communications sent by Aristotle to Alexander the Great when he was too aged to attend his pupil in person.

Turning from the actual contents of the 'Ocean of Story' we may now briefly describe the additional matter which has been brought together in the six volumes that have appeared up to date in this sumptuous edition. The first volume contains a foreword by Sir Richard Temple, to which reference has already been made,

On Tuesday, the 30th of November, 1926, the London papers contained the following remarkable story which seems to refer to a 'Poison-Damsel ' in the making: 'For allowing his child Joan, aged 4 years and 10 months, to be in a public place for the purpose of performing, Allan Boscoe, a conjurer, was fined 107. at Nuneaton, Warwickshire, yesterday. The girl was found by the police on a pedestal on Nuneaton fair ground after 8 in the evening. In her mouth was a small live snake. Boscoe afterwards produced larger snakes, which he described as dangerous and deadly. Three of these he put round the child, who later put the head of one snake in her mouth. She was described as the youngest snake-charmer in the world. She kept yawning and her lips twitched. No doubt she was feeling the taste of the snakes.'

dealing with the origin and nature of Somadeva's great collection more especially with regard to the Aryan or non-Aryan origin of the tales and of the possibility of migration of some of these stories from Europe to India. In the second volume Sir George Grierson treats of the stories in their bearing on the popular tales and customs of the peoples of the Ganges valley with which he has so long and intimate an acquaintance. Dr Gaster, whose name is familiar to all folk-lorists, contributes the foreword to Volume Three, and discusses the manner in which popular tales have grown out of old literary originals, showing that they are very often but replicas of ancient stories stripped of their geographical limitations and historical personages. He disputes the mythological theory of Grimm which recognises in the persons and incidents found in the fairy-tales remnants of ancient Teutonic myths and also the much wider anthropological theory according to which the popular tales are the depositories of primæval culture and primitive civilisations, and that the incidents related are only survivals carried unconsciously by the people who have lost every knowledge of their origin and character. Dr Gaster says: 'I see in these alleged survivals nothing else but some of the archaic details found in the written literature. The anthropological interpretations must fail when we find the very same story among nations that are almost of yesterday, and are divided from one another by race, faith, and tradition.'

Dr F. W. Thomas, in a learned foreword to the fourth volume, discusses rather the medium through which these stories were conveyed to the Indian public than the subject-matter of the collection itself and the class of supernatural beings with which the stories in this volume are chiefly concerned, namely, the Vidyadharas, or knowledge-holders, who are for the most part spirits of the air. The foreword to the fifth volume deals with the origin and dissemination of the 'Kalila and Dimna' literature, and in addition to the foreword there is an appendix by Prof. Franklin Edgerton giving a genealogical table of the Panchatantra' in which all the versions derived from the Kalila and Dimna' in the various languages of Asia and Europe are discussed, including a table of all the versions set out in

genealogical form. The foreword to the sixth volume is from the pen of Mr A. R. Wright, President of the Folk-Lore Society.

Our debt to Mr Penzer is not, however, confined to what we owe him for republishing Tawney's translation in its present worthy form, but is greatly increased by the thirteen appendices he has added to this edition. We cannot in this place do more than enumerate the main topics of these appendices; but this will suffice to show how wide the editor has cast his net. They deal, for example, with the Use of Collyrium or Kohl, Sacred Prostitution, Umbrellas, Poison-Damsels, Sneezing Salutations, Widow-burning, the well-known Rhampsinitus story, and the Vetāla or Vampire tales. All these appendices bear witness to an immense amount of research in the vast field of folk-lore literature, and we feel confident that Mr Penzer in the four remaining volumes will preserve the high standard he has hitherto attained.

E. DENISON Ross.

Art. 10.-THE NATIONAL MOVEMENT IN CHINA.

THE bewilderment with which Englishmen have long contemplated the chaotic conditions of modern China has deepened since the unfortunate shooting incident at Shanghai on May 30, 1925; for it was immediately after that event, and as a direct consequence of it, that the activities of the politically-minded section of Young China began to take a definitely anti-British direction.

While Western knowledge of China was till recently almost stationary, or advancing only by almost imperceptible degrees, Chinese knowledge of the West has been progressing with great rapidity. This is less surprising than it may seem at first sight. It is hardly too much to say that Chinese students, even those who have no knowledge of any European language, have better opportunities of forming accurate ideas about what is going on in the various countries of the European and American continents than the average Englishman has of learning the true facts about China. And they make good use of the opportunities offered; for it must be confessed that the Chinese student is, as a rule, far more keenly observant of the West than the average European or American is of China.

This in itself is not surprising, though the results may be mortifying to Western pride. The West is only beginning to take the Chinese and their problems seriously. China has stood too long outside the main current of Western life and thought to be regarded by the West as other than an object of curiosity, interesting mainly as being a land of quaint surprises, in which everything is done topsy-turvily. The study of things Chinese was till recently regarded as a hobby; and there was a tendency to deprecate too ardent a devotion to this hobby, on the ground that it was likely to result in an incurable if amiable form of dementia. The Chinese, on the other hand, know and have long known that they cannot afford to treat the West merely as an object of amused interest. They take it very seriously indeed, because they know that the fate of their country depends upon their ability to understand the West and to learn and apply the lessons that it has to teach.