Source.-Miss Frere, Old Deccan Days, pp. 1-16, from her ayah, Anna de Souza, of a Lingaet family settled and Christianised at Goa for three generations. I should perhaps add that a Prudhan is a Prime Minister, or Vizier; Punts are the same, and Sirdars, nobles.

Parallels.-The son of seven mothers is a characteristic Indian conception, for which see Notes on "The Son of Seven Queens" in this collection, No. xvi. The mother transformed, envious stepmother, ring recognition, are all incidents common to East and West; bibliographical references for parallels may be found under these titles in my List of Incidents. The external soul of the ogre has been studied by Mr. E. Clodd in Folk-Lore Journal, vol. ii., "The Philosophy of Punchkin," and still more elaborately in the section, "The External Soul in Folk-tales," in Mr. Frazer's Golden Bough, ii. pp. 296- 326. See also Major Temple's Analysis, II. iii., Wideawake Stories, pp. 404-5, who there gives the Indian parallels.

Remarks.-Both Mr. Clodd and Mr. Frazer regard the essence of the tale to consist in the conception of an external soul or "life-index," and they both trace in this a "survival" of savage philosophy, which they consider occurs among all men at a certain stage of culture. But the most cursory examination of the sets of tales containing these incidents in Mr. Frazer's analyses shows that many, indeed the majority, of these tales cannot be independent of one another; for they contain not alone the incident of an external materialised soul, but the further point that this is contained in something else, which is enclosed in another thing, which is again surrounded by a wrapper. This Chinese ball arrangement is found in the Deccan ("Punchkin"); in Bengal (Day, Folk-Tales of Bengal); in Russia (Ralston, p. 103 seq., "Koschkei the Deathless," also in Mr. Lang's Red Fairy Book); in Servia (Mijatovics, Servian Folk-Lore, p. 172); in South Slavonia (Wratislaw, p. 225); in Rome (Miss Busk, p. 164); in Albania (Dozon, p. 132 seq.); in Transylvania (Haltrich, No. 34); in Schleswig-Holstein (Mullenhoff, p. 404); in Norway (Asbjornsen, No. 36, ap. Dasent, Pop. Tales, p. 55, "The Giant who had no Heart in his Body"); and finally, in the Hebrides (Campbell, Pop. Tales, p. 10, cf. Celtic Fairy Tales, No. xvii., "Sea Maiden"). Here we have the track of this remarkable idea of an external soul enclosed in a succession of wrappings, which we can trace from Hindostan to the Hebrides.

It is difficult to imagine that we have not here the actual migration of the tale from East to West. In Bengal we have the soul "in a necklace, in a box, in the heart of a boal fish, in a tank"; in Albania "it is in a pigeon, in a hare, in the silver tusk of a wild boar"; in Rome it is "in a stone, in the head of a bird, in the head of a leveret, in the middle head of a seven-headed hydra"; in Russia "it is in an egg, in a duck, in a hare, in a casket, in an oak"; in Servia it is "in a board, in the heart of a fox, in a mountain"; in Transylvania "it is in a light, in an egg, in a duck, in a pond, in a mountain;" in Norway it is "in an egg, in a duck, in a well, in a church, on an island, in a lake"; in the Hebrides it is "in an egg, in the belly of a duck, in the belly of a wether, under a flagstone on the threshold." It is impossible to imagine the human mind independently imagining such bizarre convolutions. They were borrowed from one nation to the other, and till we have reason shown to the contrary, the original lender was a Hindu. I should add that the mere conception of an external soul occurs in the oldest Egyptian tale of "The Two Brothers," but the wrappings are absent.