Wrangel says each of the Yakuts ate in a day six times as many fish as he could eat. Cochrane describes a five-year-old child of this race as devouring three candles, several pounds of sour frozen butter, and a large piece of yellow soap, and adds: “I have repeatedly seen a Yakut, or a Yongohsi, devour forty pounds of meat in a day.”[86] Yet the savage is less powerful than the civilized man. “He is unable,” says Spencer, “to exert suddenly as great an amount of force, and he is unable to continue the expenditure of force for so long a time.” CHAPTER VI. PRIMITIVE SURGERY. Arrest of Bleeding.—The Indian as Surgeon.—Stretchers, Splints, and Flint Instruments.—Ovariotomy.—Brain Surgery.—Massage.—Trepanning.—The Cæsarean Operation.—Inoculation. Primitive man, from the earliest ages, must have been a diligent student of medicine; it has indeed been wisely said that the first man was the first physician. That is to say, he must have been at least as careful to avoid noxious things and select good ones as the beasts, and, as in the lowest scale, he must have been able in some degree to observe, reflect, and compare one thing with another, and so find out what hurt and what healed him, he would at once begin to practise the healing art, either that branch of it which is directed towards maintaining the health or that of alleviating suffering. When his fellow-men were sick and died, he would be led to wonder why they perished; and when other men stricken in like manner recovered, he would speculate as to the causes of their cure. It is probable that at first little attention was paid to the loss of blood when an artery was severed. Soon, however, it would be remarked that under such conditions the man would faint, and perhaps die. In process of time it would be observed that when the injured blood-vessel was by any means, natural or artificial, closed, the man quickly recovered. Then some one wiser than the other would bind a strip of fibre or a piece of the skin of a beast around the bleeding limb, and the hæmorrhage would cease, and the operator would gain credit and reward. He would then, naturally, give himself airs, and pretend, in course of time, to some importance, and so become a healer by profession. It would soon be noticed that those who, in the search for berries in the woods, ate of certain kinds, more or less promptly died, and those who had abstained from their use survived. It would be understood that such berries must not be eaten. Or again, a man suffering from some pain in his stomach would eat of a particular plant that seemed good for food, and his pain would be relieved: it might be ages before primitive man would arrive at the conclusion that there was some connection between the pain and its disappearance after eating of the plant in question; but in process of time the two things would be associated, and everybody would use the curative plant for the particular pain.