All or nearly all of the unwritten literature of the Caucasian mountaineers may be referred to one or the other of three great classes. First. Literature which is intended simply to amuse or entertain, including popular tales, beast-fables, anecdotes, riddles and burlesques. Second. Literature which grows out of, and afterward reacts upon, the popular love of glory, of war, of adventure and of heroism, including historical ballads, death-songs and the fiery orations of the mullahs. And third. Literature which serves merely as an outlet for the emotions. A fourth class might perhaps be made of the prayers, exhortations, pious traditions and edifying anecdotes of the theological schools and the mosques, but such productions are more or less alike among all Mohammedan peoples, and those current in the Caucasus are interesting only as illustrations of a peculiar phase of Oriental mysticism--viz. the philosophy of the Murids. Of these three classes, that which includes anecdotes, beast-fables and popular tales is, although not the most original, by far the most varied and extensive, comprising as it does full four-fifths of the entire body of Caucasian traditionary lore. The popular tales already collected by the officers of the Caucasian mountain administration at Tiflis would make a volume of four or five hundred pages, and as yet the collectors have hardly gone outside the limits of the single province of Daghestan. For the most part, however, these stories are only variants of well-known Aryan and Turanian originals, and are valuable chiefly for their local coloring and for the light which they throw upon the tastes, the habits and the mental processes of a peculiar and long-isolated people. Yet the fact that they are among the oldest heirlooms of the human race does not detract in the least from their value as indices to character. On the contrary, it adds to it by linking them with the folk-lore of the world, and enabling the student to compare them with their original types and understand and estimate aright the significance of the variations. Every one knows how a story is unconsciously varied, colored and adapted in the course of repeated narration to accord with the views, knowledge and tastes of its successive narrators, and how differently the same intellectual framework of fact or fancy will be filled up by the imaginations of different races. This working-over process, which has been going on in the Caucasus without interference and without literary restraint for hundreds--perhaps thousands--of years, has given to Caucasian stories a peculiar psychological interest which in their original forms they never could have had. The themes upon which they were originally founded are most of them perfectly familiar to every student of comparative folk-lore, but the modifications which they have undergone, the changed forms in which they reappear, are all new, and every such change or modification points to some peculiarity in