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 religioese Gebraeuche
und Uebungen, welche, mit einigen anderen Erscheinungen in ihrem Leben,
mit ihrem jetzigen Culturzustande ganz unvereinbar erscheinen, wenn man
darin nicht die Spuren einer frueher hoehern Bildung erkennen will.'
Sayce agrees with this.]

But while it is thus with him, while this is the downward course of all
those that have chosen the downward path, while with every
impoverishing and debasing of personal and national life there goes
hand in hand a corresponding impoverishment and debasement of language;
so on the contrary, where there is advance and progress, where a divine
idea is in any measure realizing itself in a people, where they are
learning more accurately to define and distinguish, more truly to know,