Note 178 — Appendix. VARIANTS AND ANALOGUES OF THE TALES IN THE SUPPLEMENTAL NIGHTS, VOL. III. (continued 3)

Here again we have the old superstition of “blood speaking to blood,” referred to by Sir Richard, ante, p. 531, note 3. It often occurs in Asiatic stories. Thus in the Persian “Bakhtyár Náma,” when the adopted son of the robber-chief is brought with other captives, before the king (he is really the king’s own son, whom he and the queen abandoned in their flight through the desert), his majesty’s bowels strangely yearned towards the youth, and in the conclusion this is carried to absurdity: when Bakhtyár is found to be the son of the royal pair, “the milk sprang from the breasts of the queen,” as she looked on him—albeit she must then have been long past child-bearing!