April 17 Tuesday – The New York Times, p.6 ran an article from the Minneapolis Times:

The Frog Two Thousand Years Old.

A college professor recently asked Mark Twain, “How old do you suppose your jumping frog story is?”

“I know exactly,” replied Mark. “It is fifty-five years old.”

“You are mistaken,” remarked the professor. “It is more than 2,000 years old. It is a Greek story.”

Mark naturally denied that it was a Greek story; it was a California story, and a Calaveras County yarn at that. But the professor merely polished his glasses. He brought Mark the books, and showed him his jumping frog story in very choice Greek with a fringe of Hellenic roots around the margin.

Now the interesting question is, Did the frog episode occur in Angel’s Camp in the Spring of ’49? Mark is perfectly sure that it did. The professor is equally sure that its duplicate happened in Beotia a couple of thousand years ago.

Nobody will presume to say that Twain read this story in a Greek book as far back as ’65, when he retold it, for at that time he knew no Greek. It is only necessary to reflect on the sameness of human history to arrive at the correct conclusion that the story originated in Greece B.C. just as it originated in America A.D. Human nature accounts for it in both instances. The story is only an effort of one man to insure the success of a wager against another. The Greeks were just as apt to try for a cinch as anybody else. The use of the frog is the only coincidence in the story. The rest of it is just as Greek as it is Yankee and as Yankee as it is Greek. [Note: In the Apr. 1894 North American Review article, “Private History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ Story,” the professor is identified as Prof. Van Dyke of Princeton. See Budd, Collected 2: 152].