The preservation of life also receives great attention in the Avesta. We remember the incantations of the Rigveda which banish sickness into thrushes and woodpeckers, and the sentences of the Atharvaveda against sickness and death (IV. 281). The remedies of the Veda are water and plants. All remedies are in water; the waters of the springs and the waters of the rivers drive away sickness. The plants said, when they came from heaven, that they descended from the water of the sky. "The mortal whom we touch will suffer no harm." "May Agni protect me with the waters, and Soma with the plants," we are told in the Veda; and again: "The plants whose king is Soma, have rescued me from death."[393] The priest who knows the sentences is at the same time the physician, though the Rigveda has a separate name for the latter (IV. 35). How highly the Indians respected doctors and physicians at a later time, in spite of the theory of the Brahmans of the unworthiness of the body, and how it was the custom there in the sixth century B.C. to send for the physician in every sickness, has been mentioned in its place (IV. 323). Proceeding from precisely the same conceptions, the Avesta went on to fill several books with medical remedies. The best mode of healing is that by charms, and the sacred word. In such incantations of the Avesta we are told: "I contend against sickness, I contend against death, I contend against pain, I contend against fever, I contend against the corruption and pollution which Angromainyu has created in the body of men. Sickness, I curse thee; fever, I curse thee; death, I curse thee."[394] The sacred word is invoked to heal by its power. "Mayst thou heal me, O Manthra Çpenta. As a recompense I will give to thee a thousand stall-fed oxen, a thousand spotless cattle, a thousand swiftly-running horses, a thousand camels, swift and with strong backs. I will bless thee with beautiful, pious blessings; with dear, pious blessings, which make the deficient full, and the full to overflow, which bind the friend and make the bond firm."[395] As in the Veda, the remedies are water and plants, "Draw up, ye clouds, draw up," we are told in the Vendidad; "Let the water fall as thousand-fold, ten thousand-fold rain, to drive away sickness, to drive away corruption, to drive away death. May it rain for the renewal of the waters, the earth, the plants, the means of healing."[396] As in the Veda Soma is the king of plants, so in Iran Haoma, the god of life, is the lord of plants.[397] The white heavenly Haoma grows, as we have seen, on the Gaokerena, the tree of heaven; from it springs the earthly Haoma and all plants of which the seed falls from the tree Viçpotaokhma in Vourukasha, which the bird Chamru carries where Tistrya collects the clouds, in order to let the seed fall down from them to the earth.[398] "I, who am the giver of all blessings," says Auramazda, "created this dwelling (the earth), the beautiful, brilliant, and noteworthy; then