of buka-buka for book is good evidence as to who taught them to read. But the name that the Tahitian nobles are now commonly adopting, instead of the native term arii, is bad evidence as to the origin of caste among them; they like the title of tavana, which is a native attempt at governor.
Even the etymology of a word may sometimes throw light upon the transmission of art and knowledge from one country to another, as where we may see how the Roman made substantia by translating ὑπόστασις, and the German, making himself a word for "superstition," aberglaube, Flemish overgeloof, that is "over belief," had the super of superstitio before him when he introduced into his language a notion which it had perhaps hardly realized before. To take a more speculative case of a very different kind, the tea-urns used in Russia are well known, but where did the Russians get the invention from? They get their tea from China, where tea-urns much resembling our own have long been in use. But the apparatus is no new thing in Europe, and the specimen in the Naples Museum, if it were coloured with the conventional chocolate colour, and had a tap put in to replace the original one which is lost, would perhaps be only remarked upon at an English tea-table as being beautiful but old-fashioned. It was kept hot by charcoal burning in a tube in the middle, like the Russian urns. Now the name of a vessel just answering this description has been preserved, authepsa (αὐθέψης, "self-boiler"), and of this term the Russian name for their urns, samovar, "self-boiler," is an exact translation. The coincidence suggests that they may have received both the thing and its name through Constantinople. Moreover, there is reason to think that the Western element in Chinese art is far more important than is popularly supposed, and the tea-urn is so peculiar an apparatus, and so strikingly alike in ancient Italy and in China, that it is scarcely possible that the two should be the results of separate invention. The Russians actually supply Bokhara with samovars,[1] so that on the whole there seems fair ground for the view that the hot-water urn originated very early in Europe, and travelled east as far as China.
- ↑ Vambéry, 'Travels in Central Asia;' London, 1864, p. 173.
