[In the following essay, Cons suggests that Aesop's fable of "The Farmer and the River" descends from a neolithic saying that comments on the infrequency of finding useable stone axe-heads in a river.]

In Carl Halm's collection of Aesop's Fables (Leipzig, 1863) No. 308 … ["A Woodcutter and Hermes"] (No. 44 of Corais's collection) is the story of a woodcutter who, having dropped his axe into a river, refuses to accept the gold and silver ones that Hermes offers him in exchange. He asks only to have his own restored to him, and is rewarded for his honesty by the gift of the three axes. Other woodcutters having heard of this adventure, pretend to have lost their axes in the same river, and call for an axe of gold. Hermes indignant refuses to restore even their own. Then follows a moral to the effect that, in the eyes of the Divine, honesty is the best policy.

But in addition to this well-known version, there is another that in Halm's collection bears the number 308b, and the title … ["A Farmer and a River"]. In this variant, a peasant, walking by the river, let his axe or rather his axe-head … fall into the water. Hearing his lament, the River itself appears and there ensues the same scene of temptation, honest denial and reward as in the preceding version. Another man of the fields hearing of this, and wishing to enjoy the River's munificence, does what the others did. He jumps at the offer of the golden axe, and meets with a stern refusal. Then the honest peasant, seeing the disappointed schemer, tells him: … "It is not every time that the River brings axes."

Now on comparing these two versions, we are struck by several interesting facts that point to the more archaic character of the second. In the first place, the hero in 308b is no longer a "woodcutter," which smacks of a kind of professional specialization, but a plain man of the soil. In the second place, the lost tool is not an axe complete with its handle…, not the two-edged axe for felling trees, but … is properly an 'axe-head.' Thirdly, the divine agent is not Hermes but the River itself into which the axe was dropped. Finally—and this point seems to us to be the most striking and rich in conclusions—instead of the somewhat flat-footed and optimistic moral of the first version, we meet with a terse saying: "It is not every time that the River brings axes." It is especially in this connection that we may conjecture that we have to deal with a truly archaic form of the tale. Indeed if we give a little reflection to that last sentence, we realize that it is in all probability the whole nucleus, the original idea around which as it were, the tale gravitates, or better still around which it has crystallized. The situation strikes us as strangely plain and clear. Primitive man must have found sometimes in the river, axe-heads, evidently of stone, such as the fancy of the corrosive action of the streams will produce at times, and which are even today a source of confusion for the archaeologist and the anthropologist. Such lucky finds spared the neolithic man much work, and may we not surmise that a saying such as this one: "It is not every time that the River brings axes " represents a very natural generalization, and the most direct form of a proverb? In our variant, the object, … is precisely what we may expect in this hypothesis, what may naturally be found shaped in the bed of a river, an "axe-head"—not the more elaborate [complete axe] of the other version. But the axes of precious metals are probably accessories belonging to an ulterior stage of the tale, accretions added by ages in which the primeval [axe-head] of stone was no longer in use, by ages in which the primitive saying as it stood would have had no meaning. The story was elaborated in explanation of the saying.

If we are right we have here, represented by the version 308b of the Aesopic fables, a clear case of the way in which a tale grew out of a simple and immediate kernel: a prehistoric proverb. It would be too sweeping a statement to say that all fables must have grown that way. But it is at least worthy of mention to find one instance in which one fable did. We shall some day offer to the readers of the American Journal of Archaeology other such instances—if only the River brings us other axes to grind!