On the Study of Words | Page 9

has remarked in them the same absence of any words expressing the idea of gratitude.
Nor is it only in what they have forfeited and lost, but also in what they have retained or invented, that these languages proclaim their degradation and debasement, and how deeply they and those that speak them have fallen. For indeed the strange wealth and the strange poverty, I know not which the strangest and the saddest, of the languages of savage tribes, rich in words which proclaim their shame, poor in those which should attest the workings of any nobler life among them, not seldom absolutely destitute of these last, are a mournful and ever- recurring surprise, even to those who were more or less prepared to expect nothing else. Thus I have read of a tribe in New Holland, which has no word to signify God, but has one to designate a process by which an unborn child may be destroyed in the bosom of its mother. [Footnote: A Wesleyan missionary, communicating with me from Fiji, assures me I have here understated the case. He says: 'I could write down several words, which express as many different ways of killing an unborn child.' He has at the same time done me the favour to send me dreadful confirmation of all which I have here asserted. It is a list of some Fiji words, with the hideous meanings which they bear, or facts which they imply. He has naturally confined himself to those in one domain of human wickedness--that, namely, of cruelty; leaving another domain, which borders close on this, and which, he assures me, would yield proofs quite as terrible, altogether untouched. It is impossible to imagine a record more hideous of what the works of the arch-murderer are, or one more fitted to stir up missionary zeal in behalf of those dark places of the earth which are full of the habitations of cruelty. A very few specimens must suffice. The language of Fiji has a word for a club which has killed a man; for a dead body which is to be eaten; for the first of such bodies brought in at the beginning of a war; for the flesh on each side of the backbone. It has a name of honour given to those who have taken life; it need not have been the life of an enemy; if only they have shed blood--it may have been the life of a woman or a child--the title has been earned. It has a hideous word to express the torturing and insulting of an enemy, as by cutting off any part of his body--his nose or tongue, for instance--cooking and eating it before his face, and taunting him the while; the [Greek: hakrotaeriazein] of the Greeks, with the cannibalism added. But of this enough.] And I have been informed, on the authority of one excellently capable of knowing, an English scholar long resident in Van Diemen's Land, that in the native language of that island there are [Footnote: This was written in 1851. Now, in 1888, Van Diemen's Land is called Tasmania, and the native language of that island is a thing of the past.] four words to express the taking of human life--one to express a father's killing of a son, another a son's killing of a father, with other varieties of murder; and that in no one of these lies the slightest moral reprobation, or sense of the deep-lying distinction between to 'kill' and to 'murder'; while at the same time, of that language so richly and so fearfully provided with expressions for this extreme utterance of hate, he also reports that a word for 'love' is wanting in it altogether. Yet with all this, ever and anon in the midst of this wreck and ruin, there is that in the language of the savage, some subtle distinction, some curious allusion to a perished civilization, now utterly unintelligible to the speaker; or some other note, which proclaims his language to be the remains of a dissipated inheritance, the rags and remnants of a robe which was a royal one once. The fragments of a broken sceptre are in his hand, a sceptre wherewith once he held dominion (he, that is, in his progenitors) over large kingdoms of thought, which now have escaped wholly from his sway. [Footnote: See on this matter Tylor, Early History of Mankind, pp. 150-190; and, still better, the Duke of Argyll, _On Primeval Man_; and on this same survival of the fragments of an elder civilization, Ebrard, Apologetik, vol. ii. p. 382. Among some of the Papuans the faintest rudiments of the family survive; of the tribe no trace whatever; while yet of these one has lately written:--'Sie haben religi?se Gebr?uche und Uebungen, welche, mit einigen anderen