Leaving Wordsworth, however, and coming back to our main line of thought, we may point out that while early peoples were intellectually mere babies--with their endless yarns about heroes on horseback leaping over wide rivers or clouds of monks flying for hundreds of miles through the air, and their utter failure to understand the general concatenations of cause and effect--yet practically and in their instinct of life and destiny they were, as I have already said, by no means fools; certainly not such fools as many of the arm-chair students of these things delight to represent them. For just as, a few years ago, we modern civilizees studying outlying nations, the Chinese for instance, rejoiced (in our vanity) to pick out every quaint peculiarity and absurdity and monstrosity of a supposed topsyturvydom, and failed entirely to see the real picture of a great and eminently sensible people; so in the case of primitive men we have been, and even still are, far too prone to catalogue their cruelties and obscenities and idiotic superstitions, and to miss the sane and balanced setting of their actual lives. Mr. R. R. Marett, who has a good practical acquaintance with his subject, had in the Hibbert Journal for October 1918 an article on "The Primitive Medicine Man" in which he shows that the latter is as a rule anything but a fool and a knave--although like 'medicals' in all ages he hocuspocuses his patients occasionally! He instances the medicine-man's excellent management, in most cases, of childbirth, or of wounds and fractures, or his primeval skill in trepanning or trephining--all of which operations, he admits, may be accompanied with grotesque and superstitious ceremonies, yet show real perception and ability. We all know--though I think the article does not mention the matter--what a considerable list there is of drugs and herbs which the modern art of healing owes to the ancient medicine-man, and it may be again mentioned that one of the most up-to-date treatments--the use of a prolonged and exclusive diet of MILK as a means of giving the organism a new start in severe cases--has really come down to us through the ages from this early source. (1) The real medicine-man, Mr. Marett says, is largely a 'faith-healer' and 'soul-doctor'; he believes in his vocation, and undergoes much for the sake of it: "The main point is to grasp that by his special initiation and the rigid taboos which he practises--not to speak of occasional remarkable gifts, say of trance and ecstasy, which he may inherit by nature and have improved by art--he HAS access to a wonder-working power.... And the great need of primitive folk is for this healer of souls." Our author further insists on the enormous play and influence of Fear in the savage mind--a point we have touched on already--and gives instances of Thanatomania, or cases where, after a quite slight and superficial wound, the patient becomes so depressed