Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/670

652 affording instruction to the most able of their white confrères; and to be a medicine-man at all demands that the individual be not only a shrewd student of human nature capable of drawing deductions from matters seemingly most trifling, but also an expert conjurer and wizard. I have repeatedly known events in the far future to be predicted with scrupulous fidelity to details, exactly as they subsequently occurred; the movements of persons and individuals to be described in minutiae who had never been seen, and were hundreds of miles away, without a single error as to time, place, or act; and I have witnessed feats of legerdemain and necromancy that would appall a Houdin or a Heller, executed in broad daylight, without mystic aids or surroundings. I have seen guns, manifestly in perfect order, fail to execute their mission while in the hands of most expert marksmen, merely through a look, a touch, a word, or a bit of incantation; and yet again restored by a like process. But here, as may readily be surmised, the trouble was not with the weapon, but with the man behind it, whose will-power was not equal to the task of overcoming his native and inherent superstition. Again, it has been my fortune to witness feats so astounding that I dare not place them upon record lest I be accused of romancing; some, to be sure, susceptible of explanation under physical and psychical laws; others not so easily or satisfactorily disposed of, except perhaps as tricks of the imagination, "optical delusions," etc.; and even as to these few would be willing to admit that, of an audience numbering some scores, all could be successfully deluded.

Having already intimated that the Indian relies chiefly on incantation and conjuration to produce specific effects, it is readily understood that success is due to the impressions produced upon the great nerve-centers. Just as the ancients esteemed the ear and nose the highways and emunctories of the brain, the special senses of hearing and smell become the foundation of all savage physiology, and consequently are appealed to in the most emphatic and comprehensive manner. Noise and odor are ever the prime factors in the armamentarium therapeuticum of the medicine-man, and it is no exaggeration