Dobrizhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, in his curious _History of the
Abipones,_ tells us that neither these nor the Guarinies, two of the
principal native tribes of Brazil, possessed any word in the least
corresponding to our 'thanks.' But what wonder, if the feeling of
gratitude was entirely absent from their hearts, that they should not
have possessed the corresponding word in their vocabularies? Nay, how
should they have had it there? And that in this absence lies the true
explanation is plain from a fact which the same writer records, that,
although inveterate askers, they never showed the slightest sense of
obligation or of gratitude when they obtained what they sought; never
saying more than, 'This will be useful to me,' or, 'This is what I
wanted.' Dr. Krapf, after laborious researches in some widely extended
dialects of East Africa, 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