When Prof. Bartram, the anthropologist, was in Burma, his servant was seized with an apopleptic fit. The man’s wife, of course, attributed the misfortune to an angry demon, so she set out for him little heaps of rice, and was heard praying, “Oh, ride him not! Ah, let him go! Grip him not so hard! Thou shalt have rice! Ah, how good that tastes!” The exorcist may so delude himself that he may believe that he has power to make the demon converse with him. There may be a falsetto voice like that of the mediums of modern civilization issuing from the patient’s mouth, and the exorcist’s questions and commands may be answered, and the evil spirit may consent to leave the sufferer in peace. In nervous or mental disorders, in cases of defective power of assimilating food, such a process may exert a soothing and highly beneficial influence on the patient who is actively co-operating by his faith in his own cure, and so the error both as to the cause of the malady and its treatment is perpetuated. Primitive folk think that life is indestructible; what is called death is but a change of condition to them; even mites and mosquitos are immortal.[45] The Tasmanian, when he suffers from a gnawing disease, believes that he has unwittingly pronounced the name of a dead man, who, thus summoned, has crept into his body, and is consuming his liver. The sick Zulu believes that some dead ancestor he sees in a dream has caused his ailment, wanting to be propitiated with the sacrifice of an ox. The Samoan thinks that the ancestral souls can get into the heads and stomachs of living men, and cause their illness and death. These are examples of human ghosts having become demons.[46] In the Samoan group people thought that if a man died bearing ill-will towards any one, he would be likely to return to trouble him, and cause sickness and death, taking up his abode in the sufferer’s head, chest, or stomach. If he died suddenly, they said he had been eaten by the spirit that took him. In the Georgian and Society Islands evil demons cause convulsions and hysterics, or twist the bowels till the sufferers die writhing in agony. Madmen are thought to be entered by a god, so they are treated with great respect; idiots are considered to be divinely inspired.[47] Many other races believe in the inspiration of mentally feeble or insane persons. Amongst the Dacotas spirits of animals, trees, stones, or deceased persons are believed to enter the patient and cause his disease. The medicine-man recites charms over him, and making a symbolic representation of the intruding spirit in bark, shoots it ceremonially; he sucks over the seat of the pain to draw the spirit out, and fires guns at it as it escapes.