There is no end of the scientific research into fairy tales, or, indeed, into anything else. A beetle or two may occupy the whole working life of a specialist, and to exhaust the knowledge – literary, anthropological, religious, antiquarian, moral, – of our nursery stories might also be the occupation of a career. Matter is said to be infinitely divisible; and so is the stuff of a Märchen. As specialism advances, we may see young men, spectacled from the cradle, and bald from their birth, voyage into middle age and extreme eld, still pouring over ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Puss in Boots’. They will trace these narratives to Aryans and barbarians; they will find lunar, solar, stellar myths in them; or will prove that ‘Puss in Boots’ was originally the Spirit of Vegetation, or a prehistoric parable of the Gulf Stream. In a book of stories gathered together for children we have little to do with all this erudition. For now twenty mortal years the Editor has been grubbing in the science of fairy tales. Twenty years ago, soon after taking his degree, it occurred to him that the old theories were to be turned upside down, that old wives’ fables represented the oldest known romances of the world, and that the classical legends which resemble them in plot were literary amplifications of early popular stories. The more he looked at this idea, the more he liked it; the more he read, the more he saw that the fancies in Grimm or Perrault were, at first, the fancies natural to untutored races and still surviving among them. This doctrine was only an expansion of the theory of the Grimms, and Mannhardt had been at work on one side of it, while it had been stated, in passing, by Fontenelle and other French writers of the last century. For twenty years one has been preaching this belief, in season, and, probably, out of season, as the root of the matter. It has constantly been corroborated, as new tales from alien lands came in – from New Guinea, Samoa, the Eskimo, South Africa, the Soudan, and Japan. The opinion is now before the world, to take or to leave, to hold that nursery tales embody early fancies of untaught races, and have been preserved by changeless peasant tradition, or to regard them as corruptions of literary romances.