Besides the points which the teaching of the Jātakas has in common with that of European moralists and satirists, it inculcates two lessons peculiar to itself--firstly, the powerful influence of inherited character; and secondly, the essential likeness between man and other animals. The former of these two ideas underlies both the central Buddhist doctrine of Karma and the theory of the Buddhas, views certainly common among all the early Buddhists, and therefore probably held by Gotama himself. And the latter of the two underlies and explains the sympathy with animals so conspicuous in these tales, and the frequency with which they lay stress upon the duty of kindness, and even of courtesy, to the brute creation. It is curious to find in these records of a strange and ancient faith such blind feeling after, such vague foreshadowing of beliefs only now beginning to be put forward here in the West; but it is scarcely necessary to point out that the paramount value to us now of the Jātaka stories is historical. In this respect their value does not consist only in the evidence they afford of the intercommunion between East and West, but also, and perhaps chiefly, in the assistance which they will render to the study of folk-lore;--that is, of the beliefs and habits of men in the earlier stages of their development. The researches of Tylor and Waitz and Peschel and Lubbock and Spencer have shown us that it is by this means that it is most easily possible rightly to understand and estimate many of the habits and beliefs still current among ourselves. But the chief obstacle to a consensus of opinion in such studies is the insufficiency and inaccuracy of the authorities on which the facts depend. While the ancient literature of peoples more advanced usually ignores or passes lightly over the very details most important from this point of view, the accounts of modern travellers among the so-called savage tribes are often at best very secondary evidence. It constantly happens that such a traveller can only tell us the impression conveyed to his mind of that which his informant holds to be the belief or custom of the tribe. Such native information may be inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading; and it reaches us only after filtration through a European mind more or less able to comprehend it rightly. But in the Jātakas we have a nearly complete picture, and quite uncorrupted and unadulterated by European intercourse, of the social life and customs and popular beliefs of the common people of Aryan tribes closely related to ourselves, just as they were passing through the first stages of civilization.