I WROTE last year that their language was very rich and very poor, full of abundance and full of scarcity, the latter appearing in a thousand different ways. All words for piety, devotion, virtue; all terms which are used to express the things of the other life; the language of Theologians, Philosophers, Mathematicians, and Physicians, in a word, of all learned men; all words which refer to the regulation and government of a city, Province, or Empire; all that concerns justice, reward and punishment; the names of an infinite number of arts which are in our Europe; of an infinite number of flowers, [175] trees, and fruits; of an infinite number of animals, of thousands and thousands of contrivances, of a thousand beauties and riches, all these things are never found either in the thoughts or upon the lips of the Savages. As they have no true religion nor knowledge of the virtues, neither public authority nor government, neither Kingdom nor Republic, nor sciences, nor any of those things of which I have just spoken, consequently all the expressions, terms, words, and names which refer to that world of wealth and grandeur must necessarily be absent from their vocabulary; hence the great scarcity. Let us now turn the tables and show that this language is fairly gorged with richness. Premierement ie trouue vne infinité de noms propres parmy eux, que ie ne puis expliquer en nostre françois, que par circumlocutions. First, I find an infinite number of proper nouns among them, which I cannot explain in our french, except by circumlocutions. Secondement, ils ont de Verbes que ie nomme absolus, dont ny les Grecs, ny les Latins, ny nous, ny les langues d'Europe, dont ie ne me suis enquis, n'ont riẽ de semblable, par exemple ce Verbe _Nimitison_, signifie absolument ie mange, sans dire quoy, car si vous determinez, la [176] chose que vous mangez, il se faut seruir d'vn autre Verbe. Second, they have some Verbs which I call absolute, to which neither the Greeks, nor Latins, nor we ourselves, nor any language of Europe with which I am familiar, have anything similar. For example, the verb _Nimitison_ means absolutely, "I eat," without saying what; for, if you determine the [176] thing you eat, you have to use another Verb.