The native's error in his judgment of the case and the missionary's justification of his position lay in the idolatrous ceremonies that are associated with the administration of the medicine. In the native's ignorant mind, and in the distress of his disease, he was unable to see a distinction between the therapeutic action of a drug and the mode of its administration. In fact, to him that mode may be as important a factor contributive to the desired result as the drug itself. In the heathen belief of the native doctor it is admittedly true that the administration, not the drug, is the important factor, both mode of administration and the drug itself deriving all their efficiency from a spirit claimed by the magician to be under his control, which is in some vague way pleased to be associated with the particular drug and those special ceremonies. The native doctor does not understand therapeutics as such. Some one of his ancestors happened to observe that a certain leaf, bark, or root exhibited internally proved efficient in cases where the symptoms indicated a certain disease which he had failed to cure by his dances, drums, auguries, and other enchantments. Not knowing the _modus operandi_ of the drug itself, he had jumped to the conclusion that he had finally happily found the adjuvant herb necessary to please the spirit for whom he had been making enchantments, without which herb the spirit had hitherto withheld its assistance. And ever afterward the secret of this particular drug was guarded by his family, the knowledge of its tree being handed down as an heirloom, the secret kept as jealously and carefully as the recipe for the proprietary medicine of any quack in civilized lands. In his medical ethics there was no _quæ prosunt omnibus_. The dividing line of morality between the fetich doctor and the Christian physician is a narrow but deep chasm. The latter knows that, with all his skill in physiology and the infallibility of his drug's indication, results lie in the hand of God, with whom are the issues of life and death, who has sovereignly and beneficently endowed certain plants or minerals with properties befitting certain pathological conditions. The former ignores God, and firmly believes that his own enchantments have subsidized the power of a spirit, so that the spirit itself is to enter into the body of the patient, and, searching through his vitals, drive out the antagonizing spirit, which is the supposed actual cause of the disease. The etiology of disease is to the native obscure. His attempts at explanation are somewhat inconsistent; the sickness is spoken of as a disease, and yet the patient is said to be sick because of the presence of an evil spirit, which being driven out by the magician's benevolent spirit the patient will recover.