Such is the curious nature of man that his science starts with superstition. The intellectual effort involved in developing what to us at least must appear as a foolish and erroneous notion, nevertheless, results in some positive advantage. We often hear it said that medicine starts with religion, and this is true in the sense that the cure of disease was once closely bound up with the belief that all suffering was due to some demon or invisible spirit that had entered the body--a view that is after all not so far removed from the modern 'germ' theory holding for so many diseases, for the germs are practically invisible and their demoniac character will assuredly not be denied. The cure of a disease in primitive medicine consisted in driving the demon out of the body, for which again we might without much difficulty find an equivalent in modern medicinal methods. Incantations were supposed to have the power of frightening the demon or in some other way of inducing them to leave the body of the victim, but it was soon discovered that certain herbs and concoctions helped to this end--not that it was at first supposed that such herbs and concoctions were useful to the patient, but that they were =obnoxious= to the demons who preferred to leave their victims rather than endure the nasty and ill-smelling combinations that frequently form the medical prescriptions attached to the incantations[153]. What we would regard as medicinal remedies were originally given to the patient, with a view and in the hope of disgusting the demon that had caused the disease--a supplement therefore to the power attributed to the recitation of certain combinations of words, and all with a view to force the demons to release their hold on the sufferer by quitting his body. From such superstitious beginnings medicine, closely bound up with the prevailing religious beliefs, took its rise. In the same way, liver divination though as a practice it belongs to the period of primitive culture and rests on an asumption which from the modern scientific point of view is the height of absurdity, nevertheless, led to the study of anatomy and as a matter of fact, the observation of the liver for purposes of divination represents the beginnings of the study of anatomy[154]. Astrology led to astronomy, and in the same way the observation of birth-omens gave rise to another science or at least to a mental discipline that until quite recently was regarded as a science--namely, the study of human and animal physiognomy. The importance given to any and to all kinds of peculiarities in the case of the young of animals and in new-born infants naturally sharpened the powers of observation, and led people to carefully scrutinize and study the features of the new-born. The large part played in this scrutiny by the supposed resemblance of the features of an infant to those of some animal formed a natural starting point, from which it was not a very large