Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/398

 powell] TECHNOLOGY, OR THE SCIENCE OF INDUSTRIES 347

There springs up in savagery a body of occult learning which is a doctrine of signatures, which comes down to the present time. Plants that have red juices act on the blood ; plants that have heart-shape leaves act on the heart. In like manner all forms or fancied resemblances of plants and animals have a significance to the shaman as indicative of their medical potency. The world is ransacked to discover these wonderful things which cannot help but reveal their use to the shaman eye.

In early civilization the chemical transmutation of things seems to excite the greatest wonder, which leads to the development of a rude chemistry of transmutation. This new chemistry is al- chemy, and the discoveries of astrology are met by the discover- ies of alchemy. In this stage of culture, astrology and alchemy prevail as the lore of medical science, which is characterized by the emblems or signatures as they appear in astrology and al- chemy. Could we enter into the subject, we could show how the potency of words or the formulae of expression are now held to be of supreme moment. As poetry is now the fine-art of al- legory, so medicine is now the healing art whose lore is taught in allegory. When science comes, the art of medical remedies is emancipated from the art of alchemy, astrology is divorced from diagnosis, and the shaman becomes either a priest on the one hand or a physician on the other. Thus religion and medicine are divorced. But neither religion nor medicine is at once freed from superstition. The progress is slow, and forever there is a war in both departments between science and superstition. How long, oh, how long will it last !

We return now to the consideration of scientific medicine, merely for the purpose of classifying the science, for we are in quest of the evidence by which we desire to exhibit the facts relating to the five properties of matter, and to show that the sci- ences are legitimately classified by considering the leading prop- erties in a science as the characteristics of that science, and then to see if such classification warrants the conclusion that there are

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