Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/132

122 body should act upon the body of the original, perhaps hardly comes into the mind of any one who assists at such a performance. But it is not easy to determine how far this is the case with the New Zealanders, whose minds are full of confusion between object and image, as we may see by their witchcraft, and who also hold strong views about their effigies, and ferociously revenge an insult to them. One very curious practice has come out of their train of thought about this matter. They were very fond of wearing round their necks little hideous figures of green jade, with their heads very much on one side, which are called tiki, and are often to be seen in museums. It seems likely that they are merely images of Tiki, creator of man and god of the dead. They are carried as memorials of dead friends, and are sometimes taken off and wept and sung over by a circle of natives; but a tiki commonly belongs, not to the memory of a single individual, but of a succession of deceased persons who have worn it in their tune, so that it cannot be considered as having in it much of the nature of a portrait. Some New Zealanders, however, who were lately in London, were asked why these tikis usually, if not always, have but three fingers on their hands, and they replied that if an image is made of a man, and any one should insult it, the affront would have to be revenged, and to avoid such a contingency the tikis were made with only three fingers, so that, not being any one's image, no one was bound to notice what happened to them.

In medicine, the notion of the real connexion between object and image has manifested itself widely in both ancient and modern times. Pliny speaks of the folly of the magicians in using the catanance (, compulsion) for love-potions, because it shrinks in drying into the shape of the claws of a dead kite (and so, of course, holds the patient fast); but it does not strike him that the virtues of the lithospermum or "stone-seed" in curing calculus were no doubt deduced in just the same way. In more modern times, such notions as these were elaborated into the old medical theory known as the "Doctrine