only a crude outline of the human body, and, which is most remarkable, it does not display any likeness to the man who is to be bewitched. As a rule the same vagueness can also be noticed in the paintings and sculptures which serve the aims of medical cure and religious cultus. With due allowance for the deficient technical ability and the naïve suggestibility of primitive man, it seems hard to believe that illusion could have been either intended or effected by the rude works of pictorial magic. Thus it becomes doubtful whether the belief in the magical power of painting and sculpture can have been based upon a confusion between subjective and objective reality. This doubt can only be increased when we see how little confidence primitive men themselves put in the mere likeness as such. When M. Rochas produced his modern imitations of the volt, he was always anxious to have his wax dolls sufficiently saturated by contact with the person over whom they were intended to give him power.[493] And in this he closely followed the methods of the native sorcerers, who generally tried to increase the efficiency of their magical instruments by attaching to them such objects as nail-cuttings, locks of hair, or pieces of cloth belonging to the man to be bewitched.[494] In the making of idols we can often observe the same principle. The statue itself is not sacred by virtue of its form; it acquires divine power only by being put in _material_ connection with the deity. The most obvious example is that of the West African Negroes, who, when they wish to transplant the wood deity from his original home to their towns and villages, build up a wooden doll of branches taken from the tree in which he lives.[495] The god is certainly supposed to feel a special temptation to take up his abode in the idol made in his own likeness; but it is evident that the material link established by the choice of the wood is thought of as being of no less, perhaps even of greater, importance than the resemblance. The same close and inseparable combination of magic by connection and magic by similarity meets us in the ancestor statues of New Guinea, which contain the skull of the dead in hollows inside their head.[496] And although the procedure is more indirect, the underlying thought is nevertheless the same in the curious practices found, _e.g._, on the island of Nias. The spirit of the deceased is here conducted to his statue by means of some small animal which has been found in the neighbourhood of his grave.[497] In none of these examples—which might be supplemented by analogous instances from various tribes—do we see any hint of that manner of regarding statues and paintings which prevails among civilised men. While with us the mental impression on the spectator constitutes, so to speak, the object and the essential purport of the work of art, the magicians and the idolaters seem to look chiefly for material power and influence in their simulacra.