Many practices of wizards involve a representation of the course of events as something very different from the reality; and there is no doubt that frequently, or even in most cases, wizards are aware of this, as in performing the sucking cure or visiting the man in the moon. But some anthropologists dislike to hear such practices described as “fraud,” “imposture” or “deceit”; and for certain classes of wizards it seems (as I shall show) unjust to speak in these terms of their profession. Still, taking the profession and its actions on the whole, it is difficult to find in popular language terms more fairly descriptive. We meet here the inconvenience that other social or moral sciences find when they try to use common words in a specially restricted sense. In Economics, _e. g._, “rent,” “wages,” “profits” have definite meanings very different from their popular acceptance. In Ethics, what controversy, what confusion in the defining of “virtue” and “the good”! In Metaphysics, what is the meaning of “cause”; what is the meaning of “intuition”? The terms must be defined in each system. If then, in these pages, the conduct of a man who, on his way to cure a sufferer of “stitch in the side,” conceals in his mouth a piece of bone or pebble, and after dancing, and sucking hard enough at the patient’s belly, produces that bone or pebble as the cause of pain—is described as “fraud,” or “imposture,” or “deceit,” the words are used to describe the fact only, without any such imputation upon the man’s character as they convey in popular usage. Scientifically considered, the man and his circumstances being such as they are, his actions are a necessary consequence; in this limited region of thought moral censure is irrelevant. There are some wizards, as it were in minor orders, such as Professor Seligman calls “departmental experts,” especially the man who blesses gardens, so earnest and harmless that no one will abuse them. They visit the garden at the owner’s request, practise a little hocus-pocus, mutter a few spells, take a small fee and go peaceably home. The owner indeed supposes himself to buy fertility, and obtains only peace of mind—a greater good say the moralists. The wizard has done what he learnt of his father, what respectable neighbours approve of; there is always some crop to justify his ministry, and many an evil power to excuse occasional blight or drought. If he is convinced of being a really indispensable man, it is easily intelligible.