Title: The Giant Crab, and Other Tales from Old India
Author: W. H. D. Rouse
Illustrator: W. Heath Robinson
Release date: May 5, 2011 [eBook #36039]
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries and Google Print.)
To the Studious or Scientific Reader
I hope no one will imagine this to be a scientific book. It is meant to amuse children; and if it succeeds in this, its aim will be hit. Thus the stories here given, although grounded upon the great Buddhist collection named below, have been ruthlessly altered wherever this would better suit them for the purpose in view; and probably some of them Buddha himself would fail to recognise.
My thanks are due to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press for permitting the use of their translation of the Jātaka Book;1 from which comes the groundwork of the stories, and occasionally a phrase or a versicle is borrowed. To this work I refer all scholars, folk-lorists and scientific persons generally: warning them that if they plunge deeper into these pages, they will be horribly shocked.
1 The Jātaka; or Stories of the Buddha’s former Births. Translated from the Pāli by various hands, under the editorship of Professor E. B. Cowell. Vol. I., translated by R. Chalmers, B.A. (1895). Vol. II., translated by W. H. D. Rouse, M.A. (1895). Vol. III., translated by H. T. Francis, M.A., and R. A. Neil, M.A. (1897). Vol. IV., in preparation. All the stories but two come from the second volume of this work.