90. Proverbs
Even where contacts are more remote, the geographical setting of two peoples often makes borrowing seem likely. The custom of uttering proverbs, for instance, has a significant distribution. It seems astonishing that barbarous West African tribes should possess a stock of proverbs as abundant and pithy as those current in Europe. Not that the proverbs are identical. The negro lacks too many articles, and too many of our manners, to allude as we do. But he does share with us the habit of expressing himself on certain situations with brief current sayings of homely and instantly intelligible nature, that put a generality into specific and concrete form. Thus: “One tree does not make a forest”; “Run from the sword and hide in the scabbard”; “If the stomach is weak, do not eat cockroaches”; “Distant firewood is good firewood.”
The proverb tendency is a sufficiently general one to suggest its independent origin in Africa and Europe. One’s first reaction to the parallel is likely to be something like this: The negro and we have formulated proverbs because we are both human beings; the coining of proverbs is instinctive in humanity. So it might be maintained. However, as soon as the distribution of proverbs the world over is reviewed, it becomes evident that their coining cannot be spontaneous, since the native American race appears never to have devised a single true proverb. On the other side are the Europeans, Africans, Asiatics, and Oceanians who are addicted to the custom. Degree of civilization evidently has nothing to do with the matter, because in the Old World primitive and advanced peoples alike use proverbs; whereas in the New World wild hunting tribes as well as the most progressive nations like the Mayas have no proverbs. The only inference which the facts allow is that there must have been a time when proverbs were unknown anywhere—still “uninvented” by mankind. Then, somewhere in the Old World, they came into use. Perhaps it was a genius that struck off the first sayings to be repeated by his associates and then by his more remote environment. At any rate, the custom spread from people to people until it extended over almost all the eastern hemisphere. Some cause, however, such as geographical isolation, prevented the extension of the movement to the western hemisphere. The American Indians therefore remained proverbless because the invention was never transmitted to them. Here, accordingly, is a case of the very incompleteness of a distribution going far to illuminate the history of a culture trait. The lack of parallelism between the hemispheres disproves the explanation by instinctive independent origin. This negative conclusion in turn tends strongly to establish the probability that the custom was borrowed, perhaps from a single source, in the four eastern continents.