The reasons for which India has been regarded as a great centre and fountain-head of popular stories are, on the other hand, excellent, if the theory is sufficiently limited. The cause is _vera causa_. Marchen certainly did set out from mediaeval India, and reached mediaeval Europe and Asia in abundance. Not to speak of oral communications in the great movements, missions and migrations, Tartar, crusading, Gypsy, commercial and Buddhistic--in all of which there must have been "swopping of stories"--it is certain that Western literature was actually invaded by the _contes_ which had won away into the literature of India.* These are facts beyond doubt, but these facts must not be made the basis of too wide an inference. Though so many stories have demonstrably been borrowed from India in the historical period, it is no less certain that many existed in Europe before their introduction. Again, as has been ably argued by a writer in the _Athenaeum_ (April 23, 1887), the literary versions of the tales probably had but a limited influence on the popular narrators, the village gossips and grandmothers. Thus no collection of published tales has ever been more popular than that of Charles Perrault, which for many years has been published not only in cheap books, but in cheaper broadsheets. * Cosquin, op. cit., i. xv., xxiv.; Max Müller, "The Migrations of Fables," Selected Essays, vol. ii., Appendix; Benfey, Pantschatantra; Comparetti, Introduction to Book of Sindibad, English translation of the Folk-Lore Society. Yet M. Sebillot and other French collectors gather from the lips of peasants versions of _Cinderella_, for example, quite unaffected by Perrault's version, and rich in archaic features, such as the presence of a miracle-working beast instead of a fairy godmother. That detail is found in Kaffir, and Santhal, and Finnish, as well as in Celtic, and Portuguese, and Scottish variants, and has been preserved in popular French traditions, despite the influence of Perrault. In the same way, M. Carnoy finds only the faintest traces of the influence of a collection so popular as the _Arabian Nights_. The peasantry regard tales which they read in books as quite apart from their inherited store of legend.* * Sebillot's popular Cendrillon is Le Taureau Bleu in Contes de la Haute Bretagne. See also M. Carnoy's Contes Francais, 1885, p. 9. If printed literature has still so little power over popular tradition, the manuscript literature of the Middle Ages must have had much less, though sometimes _contes_ from India were used as parables by preachers. Thus we must beware of over-estimating the effect of importation from India, even where it distinctly existed. Even the versions that were brought in the Middle Ages by oral tradition must have encountered versions long settled in Europe--versions which may have been current before any scribe of Egypt perpetuated a legend on papyrus.