The traveller who has little or no acquaintance with the language of the land in which he is, resorts naturally to the language of gesture, and mimics the thing which he wishes to have done. Primitive man communicates his wishes to Nature in exactly the same way: if he wishes to have game caught in the trap which he sets, he first pretends to fall into it himself. He has not learnt to "interrogate" Nature in her own language by means of experiment and crucial instances, but he has a presentiment of the method of Concomitant Variations and of the Substitution of Similars. If a thing is itself beyond his reach, he substitutes its counterpart, its image or its name, or something related to it or connected with it, in confidence that any changes he may work in the one will be accompanied by concomitant variations in the other. Hence the reluctance shown by many savages to allow their likenesses to be taken or their names to be known, as with the name or the likeness the man himself would pass into the power of the stranger.[84] So the Romans, as Plutarch informs us (_R. Q._ 61), kept the name of their tutelar god secret, for the same reason, as Plutarch acutely observes, as other nations kept the images of their gods chained;[85] and for the same reason, we may add, as the Romans forbade the living counterpart of the sky-spirit to leave the city, viz., lest he should pass out of their control. In the same spirit, the Romans would not allow a table to be completely stripped of food (_R. Q._ 64) or a light to be extinguished (75): the action might produce permanent effects. The same feeling prevailed or prevails with regard to the table in Chemnitz, though it is regarded as a sign of death if a light goes out of its own accord.[86] The practice of allowing the spoils taken from an enemy to rust—a practice which Plutarch (37) cannot comprehend—was doubtless a piece of sympathetic magic: as the armour rusted, the enemy's power of armed resistance would diminish.