"No language could possibly have been invented, either by a single man, who could not have extorted obedience, or by many who would not have made themselves understood to each other.... But I would wish, before concluding this subject, to recommend to your notice an observation which has always struck me. Whence comes it that in the primitive language of every ancient people, we find words which necessarily suppose a knowledge foreign to these people? Whence, for instance, have the Greeks, three thousand years ago at least, found the epithet 'physizoos' (giving or possessing life), which Homer sometimes gives to the earth?.... Where have they taken the still more singular epithet of 'philomate' (liking or thirsting for blood), given to this same earth in a tragedy? (Euripides, Phoen. v. 179). Æschylus had alluded before 'to the earth drinking the blood of the two rival brothers, the one slain by the other.'[237] Humboldt ('Monum. des Peuples Indigènes de l'Amerique,' Paris, 1816) has said: 'Many idioms which at present belong only to barbarous nations seem to be the remains of rich and flexible languages, which indicate a high culture.... But tell me, I pray you, how it entered the heads of the ancient Latins, at a time when they were only acquainted with the arts of war and of tillage, to express by the same word the idea of prayer and of punishment? Who taught them to call fever the "purifier," or the "expiator"?'[238] Would not one say that there was here a judgment, a veritable knowledge of the cause, by virtue of which the people affirmed the name so justly? But do you believe that these sorts of judgments could possibly have belonged to a time when they scarcely knew how to write, when the Dictator dug his garden, and in which they composed verses which Varro and Cicero no longer understood?... The Greeks had preserved some obscure traditions in this regard--[Mr Gladstone has shown them to be neither few nor obscure],--and who knows if Homer does not attest the same truth, perhaps without knowing it, when he speaks of certain men and certain things 'which the gods called after one manner, and men after another?'"--_Count Joseph de Maistre, "Soirées de St Petersbourg,"_ i. _Deux: Entretien._[239] [237] Compare with Gainet, i. 92, 93.