To which again China supplies a good parallel in
The growth of the mulberry tree follows its early bent.
On Causation.
If nothing touches the palm-leaves they do not rustle. (Oji.)
Nobody hates another without a cause. (Accra.)
A feather does not stick without gum. (A Pashto proverb.)
Again, the Turkish proverb, that curses, like chickens, come home to roost, or the Italian one that, like processions, they come back to their starting-point, is well matched by the Yoruba proverb that ‘ashes fly back in the face of their thrower.’ Or the tendency of travellers to exaggerate or tell lies, impressed as it has been on all human experience, is also confirmed by the Oji proverb, that ‘he who travels alone tells lies.’ And the universal belief in the ultimate exposure of falsehood conveyed in such proverbs as the Arabian, ‘The liar is short-lived;’ the Persian, ‘Liars have bad memories;’ or the still more expressive Italian saying, that ‘the liar is sooner caught than a cripple,’ finds itself corroborated by the Wolof proverb, that ‘lies, though many, will be caught by Truth as soon as she rises up.’ Even in Afghanistan, where it is said that no disgrace attaches to lying per se, and where lying is called an honest man’s wings, while truth can only be spoken by a strong man or a fool, there is also a proverb with the moral, that the career of falsehood is short.[124]
That ‘hope is the pillar of the world,’ that ‘it is the heart which carries one to hell or heaven,’ or that ‘preparation is better than after-thought’—all experiences of the Kanuri, a Moslem tribe, who think it a personal adornment to cut each side of their face in twenty places—shows that there is no necessary connection between general savagery and an absence of moral culture. The natives of New Zealand, with all their barbarity, had in common use a saying which were a desirable maxim for European diplomacy: ‘When you are on friendly terms, settle your disputes in a friendly way; when you are at war, redress your injuries by violence.’[125] Even the Fijians would say that an unimproved day was not to be counted, and that no food was ever cooked by gay clothes and frivolity.[126] A good Ashantee proverb warns people not to speak ill of their benefactors, by forbidding them to call a forest a shrubbery that has once given them shelter. The proverbs already quoted from Yoruba teach the same lesson, nor would it be difficult to add many more, all proving the existence among savages of a morality identical in its main features with that of the higher group of nations to which we ourselves belong, interpenetrated as it has been for ages with the philosophies and religions of the civilised East.
A similar testimony to the intellectual powers of savages is afforded by their proverbs, though of course the argument is only a suggestive one from tribes whose language has been well studied to others not so well known. That the Soudan negroes are on a higher level of general culture than many savages of other islands or continents is proved by the fact that all known Africans are acquainted with the art of smelting iron and converting it into weapons and utensils; so that they may be said to be living in the iron age, and thus, materially at least, are more advanced than the Botocudos of Brazil, who are still in the age of polished stone implements. From the fact alone that the Yorubas express their contempt for a stupid man by saying that he cannot count nine times nine, we are enabled at once to place them above tribes whose powers of numeration fall short of such readiness. Hence we should not be justified in expecting to find among Australian or American aborigines proverbs of so high an intellectual order as abound in Africa, of which the following may be selected as samples:—
Were no elephant in the jungle the buffalo would be large;