Such rude notions as these, implying a supernatural as opposed to a natural theory of the physical conditions of the body, are not wholly extinct even among ourselves. They exist, like so many of the crude conceptions of the savage, in the form of respected survivals wholly inconsistent with our practical habits. True, we do not call in the clergyman to assist or to direct at the sick-bed. But we do ask him to put up prayers for the recovery of the sick; and in the case of royal princes, the clergy throughout the land are set to work to induce the divine Being to give their illnesses a favorable turn. Now, this proceeding, however disguised under refined and imposing forms, is practically on a level with that of the Amazulu, who seeks to pacify the offended spirit that has attacked him with pain by the sacrifice of a bullock; or with that of the Fijian who, when his friend is ill, blows a shell for hours as a call to the disease-maker to stop burning the sick man's rubbish, and as a sign that presents will speedily reach his hands. Nay, the very missionary who relates this Fiji custom gives at least one proof of his fitness to understand the native mind, in a passage showing that in reference to beliefs like these his own was almost on a par with it. A war, of which the missionaries disapproved, had been going on for four months, "and the end of it was, the war was raised against ourselves. After they had been fighting for months among themselves, contrary to all our entreaties, God commenced to punish them with a deadly epidemic in the form of dysentery." Now, the conviction that diseases are punishments sent by some god, or at any rate direct results of an intention on the part of some god to harm the sufferer, is at the root of the priestly, as opposed to the scientific, treatment. For if God punishes with a deadly epidemic, it is an obvious inference that the mode of cure and of prevention is not to take physical remedies, and observe physical precautions, but to avoid the sin for which the punishment is given. And this is the common conclusion of the savage and the Christian, though the superior information of the Christian renders his conduct self-contradictory and confused, where that of the savage is logical and simple.