How Animals Talk 



this is the only one to show more than a very 

 superficial knowledge of the natives, and the 

 reason is apparent. The author thinks, most 

 reasonably, that you cannot possibly know the 

 native or understand his customs until you know 

 his thought, and that the only trail to his thought 

 is through the language in which the thought is 

 expressed. Therefore did he study the speech as a 

 means of knowing the man; and herein he is in 

 refreshing contrast to other African travelers and 

 hunters I have read, who spend a few months or 

 weeks in a white man's camp, knowing the natives 

 about as intimately as lovers know the moon, and 

 then babble of native customs or beliefs or "super- 

 stitions," as if any rite or habit could be under- 

 stood without first understanding the philosophy 

 of life from which it sprang, as a flower from a 

 hidden seed. 



This rare observer, who knows how the native 

 thinks because he perfectly understands the na- 

 tive language, tells us 1 that the Blacks clearly 

 recognize the power of animals and of normal 

 men to know many things beyond their sense 

 range; that they give it a definite name, and 

 explain it in a way which indicates an astonishing 

 degree of abstract thought on the part of those 

 whom we ignorantly call unthinking savages. 



Crawford, Thinking Black (1904). 

 [58] 



