I recollect our professor mentioning it one day in the course of his lectures.

And I have always mentally coupled that parrot of Humboldt's with my own old friend and subject, Methuselah.
However, that only impresses upon one more fully the folly of hoping that we can learn anything worth knowing from him.

I have heard him recite his story many times over, though now he repeats it less frequently than he used formerly to do; and I feel convinced it is couched in some unknown and, no doubt, forgotten language.

It is a much more guttural and unpleasant tongue than any of the soft dialects now spoken in Polynesia.
It belonged, I am convinced, to that yet earlier and more savage race which the Polynesians must have displaced; and as such it is now, I feel certain, practically irrecoverable." "If they were more savage than the Polynesians," Muriel said, with a profound sigh, "I'm sorry for anybody who fell into their clutches." "But what would not many philologists at home in England give," Felix murmured, philosophically, "for a transcript of the words that parrot can speak--perhaps a last relic of the very earliest and most primitive form of human language!" At the very moment when these things were passing under the wattled roof of Muriel's hut, it happened that on the taboo-space outside, Toko, the Shadow, stood talking for a moment with Ula, the fourteenth wife of the great Tu-Kila-Kila.
"I never see you now, Toko," the beautiful Polynesian said, leaning almost across the white line of coral-sand which she dared not transgress.

"Times are dull at the temple since you came to be Shadow to the white-faced stranger." "It was for that that Tu-Kila-Kila sent me here," the Shadow answered, with profound conviction.