, 338; ii., 505; iii., 505) that
dipping into water or milk is necessary before transformation can take
place. It is clear, therefore, that Catskin was originally transformed
into an animal by the spirit of her mother, also transformed into an
animal.
If I understand Mr. Nutt rightly (_Folk-Lore_, iv, 135, _seq._), he is
inclined to think, from the evidence of the hero-tales which have the
unsavoury _motif_ of the Unnatural Father, that the original home of the
story was England, where most of the hero-tales locate the incident. I
would merely remark on this that there are only very slight traces of
the story in these islands nowadays, while it abounds in Italy, which
possesses one almost perfect version of the formula (Miss Cox, No. 142,
from Sardinia).
Mr. Newell, on the other hand (_American Folk-Lore Journal_, ii., 160),
considers Catskin the earliest of the three types contained in Miss
Cox's book, and considers that Cinderella was derived from this as a
softening of the original.
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