As to Sorcery, it may be defined as Magic practised with the aid of spirits; and since its existence implies that a belief in spirits and their influence has already formed itself, it may also be believed to operate, in the first place, on the souls of its victims and so, in the second place, on their bodies. Then, as Prof. Wundt explains, a process of retrogradation sometimes occurs, in the course of which the spirits are forgotten, and only the mechanical rites remain as a residuum of bare Magic. Similarly, a fetich sometimes becomes a merely magical talisman or amulet. This is hardly disputable; but it does not prove that the degeneration of Sorcery is the _only_ source of Magic, or that Magic has not (for the most part, indeed,) another, independent origin. The issue is difficult to argue upon the ground of facts, because magical practices are of such high antiquity. If, for example, one should urge that the intichiuma ceremonies of the Arunta are not, so far as we have evidence, designed to operate by spiritual power upon the souls of the emu or the witchettygrub, but directly to promote by Magic the fertility of these objects, it might be replied that such, indeed, may be their present character, but that the original intention must have been to promote fertility by first influencing their souls, and that this has been forgotten. Or, again, if one should point to the little stones—tied up in bark and believed by the Kaitish to be stores of evil Magic—as having no mark of the fetich, no character to indicate that their power is due to spirits, so that they seem to be merely magical, the answer would be ready, that by long use and retrogradation they may have ceased to be fetiches, but that a good theory requires them to have been of that nature aforetime. Thus any case of apparently bare Magic may be treated as a residuum of lapsed Animism; or, should its origin be recent and ascertainable, it may still be said to have been constituted by analogy with such residua.