In the next place, just as amongst very primitive peoples we see that some magic is known by some people, viz. the magicians themselves, to be fraudulent, though other people believe in it; so, amongst very primitive peoples, we find beliefs and practices existing which have not yet come to be regarded as magical, though they are such as might come, and do elsewhere come, to be considered pure magic. Thus, for instance, when Cherokee Indians who suffer from rheumatism abstain from eating the flesh of the common grey squirrel "because the squirrel eats in a cramped position, which would clearly aggravate the pangs of the rheumatic patient" (Frazer, _History of the Kingship_, p. 70), or when "they will not wear the feathers of the bald-headed buzzard for fear of themselves becoming bald" (_ib._), they are simply following the best medical advice of their day,--they certainly do not imagine they are practising magic, any more than you or I do when we are following the prescriptions of our medical adviser. On the contrary, it is quite as obvious, then, that the feathers of the bald-headed buzzard are infectious as it is now that the clothes {77} of a fever patient are infectious. Neither proposition, to be accepted as true, requires us to believe in magic: either might spring up where magic had never been heard of. And, if that is the case, it simply complicates things unnecessarily to talk of magic in such cases. The tendency to believe that like produces like is not a consequence of or a deduction from a belief in magic: on the contrary, magic has its root or one of its roots in that tendency of the human mind. But though that tendency helps to produce magic amongst other things, magic is not the only thing which it produces: it produces beliefs such as those of the Cherokees just quoted, which are no more magical than the belief that fire produces warmth, or that _causa aequat effectum_, that an effect is, when analysed, indistinguishable from the conditions which constitute it.