Man has the power to break down and simplify complex substances and by so doing produce useful products that will serve his purposes. We may combine and re-combine but so far we only replace more complex by simpler combinations. The plant alone through its individual cells, and by its living protoplasm has fundamentally creative power. It can build up and restore better than it can eliminate waste products. HOW OUR ANCESTORS WERE CURED BY PROFESSOR CARL HOLLIDAY UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA SUPPOSE you had a bad case of rheumatism, and your physician came to your bedside and exclaimed loudly, "Hocus pocus, toutus talonteus, vade celeriter jubeo! You are cured." What would you think, what would you do, and what fee would you pay him? Probably, in spite of your aches and pangs, you would make astonishing speed--for a rheumatic person--in proffering him the entire room to himself. But there was a time--and that as late as Shakespeare's day--when so-called doctors in rural England used just such words not only for rheumatism, but for many another disease. And to this hour the fakir on the street corner uses that opening expression, "Hocus pocus." Those words simply prove how slowly the Christian religion was absorbed by ancient Anglo-Saxon paganism; for "Hocus pocus" is but the hastily mumbled syllables of the Catholic priest to his early English congregation--"Hoc est corpus," "this is the body"; and the whole expression used by the old-time doctor meant merely that in the name of the body of Christ he commanded the disease to depart quickly. How superstitions and ancient rites do persist. To this hour the mountaineers of southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennessee believe that an iron ring on the third finger of the left hand will drive away rheumatism, and to my personal knowledge one fairly intelligent Virginian believed this so devoutly that he actually never suffered with rheumatic pains unless he took off the iron ring he had worn for fifteen years. It is an old, old idea--this faith in the ring-finger. The Egyptians believed that a nerve led straight from it to the heart; the Greeks and Romans held that a blood-vessel called the "vein of love" connected it closely with that organ; and the medieval alchemists always stirred their dangerous mixtures with that finger because, in their belief, it would most quickly indicate the presence of poison. So, too, many an ancient declared that whenever the ring-finger of a sufferer became numb, death was near at hand. Thus in twentieth century civilization we hear echoes of the life that Rameses knew when the Pyramids were building.