[Footnote 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. La Fontaine published the first six books of his fables in 1668,[3] and it is well known that the subjects of most of these early fables were taken from Æsop, Phædrus, Horace, and other classical fabulists, if we may adopt this word “fabuliste,” which La Fontaine was the first to introduce into French. In 1678 a second edition of these six books was published, enriched by five books of new fables, and in 1694 a new edition appeared, containing one additional book, thus completing the collection of his charming poems. The fable of Perrette stands in the seventh book, and was published, therefore, for the first time in the edition of 1678. In the preface to that edition La Fontaine says: “It is not necessary that I should say whence I have taken the subjects of these new fables. I shall only say, from a sense of gratitude, that I owe the largest portion of them to Pilpay the Indian sage.” If, then, La Fontaine tells us himself that he borrowed the subjects of most of his new fables from Pilpay, the Indian sage, we have clearly a right to look to India in order to see whether, in the ancient literature of that country, any traces can be discovered of Perrette with the milk-pail.