The conclusion certainly seems to be justified that the most advanced animal progenitors of mankind, who lived and died unreasoning, the mere puppets of natural forces which they neither could, nor tried to, understand and control, were "happier" than the "rebel" man when he first conceived the notion that he could detect cause and effect, not only as between a blow and the production of a serviceable flint implement, but in the beneficent or injurious relations of the things around him to one another and to himself. Primitive men seem at a very remote period to have elaborated in regard to such vital matters a series of conclusions--differing in various races according to place and circumstance--to which they were led by erroneous observation and imperfect reasoning--reasoning which was arrested and distorted by fear, desire, haste, and imagination. The word "magic" is now used to indicate those beliefs and conclusions in all their variety, because the "magi" or priests of Zoroaster (Zarathustra), the founder of the religion of the ancient Persians, taught them in an elaborated form, and practised a system of supposed control of natural forces and of spirits, good and evil, in connexion with such beliefs. Magic is, therefore, defined as the general term for the practice and power of wonder-working as dependent on the employment of supposed supernatural or "occult" agencies. It forms a vast field of study and one of the greatest interest in the attempt to follow out the history of the workings of the human mind, its extraordinary envelopment in error and delusion, and its gradual emancipation therefrom.