remarks:  “Dr. Krap was unable to find any word expressing the idea of gratitude in the language of all the Suaheli (Wasawahili) tribes; a fact significant enough as to the total absence of the moral feeling denoted by that name.”  Similarly the Mpongwe cannot express our “honesty;” they must paraphrase it by “good man don’t steal.”  In time they possibly may adopt the word bodily like pus (a cat), amog (mug), kapinde (carpenter), krus (a cross), and ilepot (pot).

Such a task is difficult as it is interesting, the main obstacle to success being the almost insuperable difficulty of throwing off European ideas and modes of thought, which life-long habit has made a second nature.  Take the instance borrowed from Dr. Krap, and noticed by a hundred writers, namely, the absence of a synonym for “gratitude” amongst the people of the nearer East.  I have explained the truth of the case in my “Pilgrimage,” and it will bear explanation again.  The Wasawahili are Moslems, and the Moslem view everywhere is that the donor’s Maker, not the donor, gives the gift.  The Arab therefore expresses his “Thank you!” by “Mamnun”—­I am under an obligation (to your hand which has passed on the donation); he generally prefers, however, a short blessing, as “Kassir khayr’ ak” (may Allah) “increase thy weal!” The Persian’s “May thy shadow never be less!” simply refers to the shade which you, the towering tree, extend over him, the humble shrub.

Another instance of deduction distorted by current European ideas, is where Casalis ("Etudes sur la langue Sechuana,” par Eugene Casalis, part ii. p. 84), speaking of the Sisuto proverbs, makes them display the “vestiges of that universal conscience to which the Creator has committed the guidance of every intelligent creature.”  Surely it is time to face the fact that conscience is a purely geographical and chronological accident.  Where, may we ask, can be that innate and universal monitor in the case of a people, the Somal for instance, who rob like Spartans, holding theft a virtue; who lie like Trojans, without a vestige of appreciation for truth; and who hold the treacherous and cowardly murder of a sleeping guest to be the height of human honour?  And what easier than to prove that there is no sin however infamous, no crime however abominable, which at some time or in some part of the world has been or is still held in the highest esteem?  The utmost we can say is that conscience, the accident, flows directly from an essential.  All races now known to the world have a something which they call right, and a something which they term wrong; the underlying instinctive idea being evidently that everything which benefits me is good, and all which harms me is evil.  Their good and their evil are not those of more advanced nations; still the idea is there, and progress or tradition works it out in a thousand different ways.