The Giant Crab, and Other Tales from Old India

The Giant Crab

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press

Warning

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.

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• The Giant Crab