Once more, the Indian theory has to account for the presence of tales in Africa and America among populations which are not known to have had any contact with India at all. Where such examples are urged, it is usual to say that the stories either do not really resemble our _märchen_, or are quite recent importations by Europeans, Dutch, French, English and others.* Here we are on ground where proof is difficult, if not impossible. Assuredly French influence declares itself in certain narratives collected from the native tribes of North America. On the other hand, when the _märchen_ is interwoven with the national traditions and poetry of a remote people, and with the myths by which they account to themselves for the natural features of their own country, the hypothesis of recent borrowing from Europeans appears insufficient. A striking example is the song of Siati (a form of the Jason myth) among the people of Samoa.** Even more remarkable is the presence of a crowd of familiar _märchen_ in the national traditions of the Huarochiri, a pre-Inca civilised race of Southern Peru. These were published, or at least collected and written down, by Francisco de Avila, a Spanish priest, about 1608. He remarks that "these traditions are deeply rooted in the hearts of the people of this province".*** These traditions refer to certain prehistoric works of engineering or accidents of soil, whereby the country was drained. The Huarochiri explained them by a series of _märchen_ about Huthiacuri, Pariaca (culture-heroes), and about friendly animals which aided them in the familiar way. In the same manner exactly the people of the Marais of Poitou have to account for the drainage of the country, a work of the twelfth century. * Cosquin, op. cit, 1, xix. ** Turner's Samoa, p. 102. *** Rites of the Incas. Hakluyt Society. The third document in the book. The _märchen_ have been examined by me in _The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche_, p. lxxii. They attribute the old works to the local hero, Gargantua, who "drank up all the water".* No one supposes that this legend is borrowed from Rabelais, and it seems even more improbable that the Huarochiri hastily borrowed _märchen_ from the Spaniards, and converted them before 1600 into national myths. * _Revue des Traditions Populaires_, April 25,1887, p. 186. We have few opportunities of finding examples of remote American _märchen_ recorded so early as this, and generally the hypothesis of recent borrowing from Europeans, or from Negroes influenced by Europeans, is at least possible, and it would be hard to prove a negative. But the case of the Huarochiri throws doubt on the hypothesis of recent borrowing as the invariable cause of the diffusion of _märchen_ in places beyond the reach of historic India.