Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/144

134 kind of bewitching is found over almost as wide a range as the practices of the rainmaker, and extends like them into the upper regions of our race.

As has been so often said, these two arts are encouraged by the unfailing test of success, if they have but time enough, and the latter justifies itself by killing the patient through his own imagination. When he hears that he has been "wished," he goes home and takes to his bed at once. It is impossible to realize the state of mind into which the continual terror of witchcraft brings the savage. It is held by many tribes to be the necessary cause of death. Over great part of Africa, in South America and Polynesia, when a man dies, the question is at once, "who killed him?" and the soothsayer is resorted to to find the murderer, that the dead man may be avenged. The Abipones held that there was no such thing as natural death, and that if it were not for the magicians and the Spaniards, no man would die unless he were killed. The notion that, after all, a man might perhaps die of himself, comes out curiously in the address of an old Australian to the corpse at a funeral, "If thou comest to the other black fellows and they ask thee who killed thee, answer, 'No one, but I died.'"

There are of course branches of the savage wizard's art that are not connected with the mental process to which so many of his practices may be referred. He is often a doctor with some skill in surgery and medicine, and an expert juggler; and often, though knavery is not the basis of his profession, a cunning knave. One of the most notable superstitions of the human race, high and low, is the belief in the Evil Eye. Knowing, as we all do, the strange power which one mind has of working upon another through the eye, a power which is not the less certain for being wholly unexplained, it seems not unreasonable