The taste of the world, which has veered so often, is constant enough to fairy tales. The children to whom and for whom they are told represent the young age of man. They are true to his early loves, they have his unblunted edge of belief, and his fresh appetite for marvels. The instinct of economy so works that we are still repeating to the boys and girls of each generation the stories that were old before Homer sang, and the adventures that have wandered, like the wandering Psyche, over all the world. We may alter now and again the arrangement of incidents, but these always remain essentially the same, and of all the combinations into which they can be fitted, the oldest combinations are still the favourites.

These truisms have been for some time recognised even by Science, and the study of nursery tales, of their wander ings, their antiquity, their origin, has long been a diversion of the learned. This, however, is not the place to repeat the familiar antiquarian theories, nor to attempt any new variety of conjecture. Even a child (this preface is not meant for children) must recognise, as he turns the pages of the Blue Fairy Book, that the same adventures and something like the same plots meet him in stories translated from different lan guages. The Scotch ‘Black Bull of Norroway,’ for example, must remind the very youngest reader of ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon,’ a tale from the Norse. Both, again, have manifest resemblances to ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ and every classical student has the fable of ‘Eros and Psyche’ brought back to his memory, while every anthropologist recol lects a similar Märchen among Kaffirs and Bassutos. These resemblances and analogies recur on every page. Our ‘Bronze Ring,’ from the Levant, with the mice which make the Jew sneeze by tickling his nose, has a variant among Mongolian tribes. The Finns, the Santhals, the Kaffirs have a Cinderella of their own, like the Scotch and the Celts. Parts of ‘Hop o’ my Thumb’ (‘The Little Thumb’) are current in Tartary; the incident of the changed crowns and the murder by the ogre of his own children is part of that ancient Minyan legend of Athamas, Phrixus, and Hellê.