Even the study of fables owes its new life to India, from whence the various migrations of fables have been traced at various times and through various channels from East to West.[4] Buddhism is now known to have been the principal source of our legends and parables. But here, too, many problems still wait for their solution. Think, for instance, of the allusion to the fable of the donkey in the lion's skin, which occurs in Plato's Cratylus.[5] Was that borrowed from the East? Or take the fable of the weasel changed by Aphroditê into a woman who, when she saw a mouse, could not refrain from making a spring at it. This, too, is very like a Sanskrit fable; but how then could it have been brought into Greece early enough to appear in one of the comedies of Strattis, about 400 B.C.?[6] Here, too, there is still plenty of work to do. We may go back even farther into antiquity, and still find strange coincidences between the legends of India and the legends of the West, without as yet being able to say how they travelled, whether from East to West, or from West to East. That at the time of Solomon there was a channel of communication open between India and Syria and Palestine is established beyond doubt, I believe, by certain Sanskrit words which occur in the Bible as names of articles of export from Ophir, articles such as ivory, apes, peacocks, and sandalwood, which, taken together, could not have been exported from any country but India.[7] Nor is there any reason to suppose that the commercial intercourse between India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean was ever completely interrupted, even at the time when the Book of Kings is supposed to have been written. Now you remember the judgment of Solomon, which has always been admired as a proof of great legal wisdom among the Jews.[8] I must confess that, not having a legal mind, I never could suppress a certain shudder[9] when reading the decision of Solomon: "Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other." Let me now tell you the same story as it is told by the Buddhists, whose sacred Canon is full of such legends and parables. In the Kanjur, which is the Tibetan translation of the Buddhist Tripi_t_aka, we likewise read of two women who claimed each to be the mother of the same child. The king, after listening to their quarrels for a long time, gave it up as hopeless to settle who was the real mother. Upon this Vi_s_âkhâ stepped forward and said: "What is the use of examining and cross-examining these women? Let them take the boy and settle it among themselves." Thereupon both women fell on the child, and when the fight became violent the child was hurt and began to cry. Then one of them let him go, because she could not bear to hear the child cry. That settled the question. The king gave the child to the true mother, and had the other beaten with a rod.