t if a man's
shadow so much as falls on one of them, the ghost in the stone will
clutch the shadow and pull the soul clean out of the man, who dies
accordingly. Such stones, dangerous as they unquestionably are to the
chance passer-by, nevertheless for that very reason possess a valuable
property which can be turned to excellent account. A man, for example,
will put one of these stones in his house to guard it like a watch-dog
in his absence; and if he sends a friend to fetch something out of it
which he has forgotten, the messenger, on approaching the house, will
take good care to call out the owner's name, lest the ghost in the
stone, mistaking him for a thief and a robber, should pounce out on him
and do him a mischief before he had time to explain.[616]

[Sidenote: Contrast between Melanesian and European medicine.]

Thus it appears that for a medical practitioner in Melanesia the first
requisite is an intimate acquaintance, not with the anatomy of the human
frame and the properties of drugs, but with ghosts, their personal
peculiarities, habits, and haunts. Only by means of the influence which
such a knowledge enables him to exert on these powerful and dangerous
beings can the good physician mitigate and assuage the sufferings of
poor humanity. His professional skill, while it certainly aims at the
alleviation of physical evils, attains its object chiefly, if not
exclusively, by a direct appeal to those higher, though invisible,
powers which encompass the life of man, or at all events of the
Melanesian. The firm faith in the spiritual and the unseen which these
sable doctors display in their treatment of the sick presents a striking
contrast to the procedure of their European colleagues, who trust
exclusively to the use of mere physical remedies, such as drugs and
lancets, now carving the body of the sufferer with knives, and now
inserting substances, about which they know little, into places about
which they know nothing. Has not science falsely so called still much to
learn from savagery?

[Sidenote: The weather believed to be regulated by ghosts and spirits.
Weather-doctors.]

But it is not the departments of medicine and surgery alone, important
as these are to human welfare, which in Melanesia are directed and
controlled by spiritual forces. The weather in those regions is also
regulated by ghosts and spirits. It is they who cause the wind to blow
or to be still, the sun to shine forth or to be overcast wi