y at a late stage in the history of mankind. On the contrary, it is
present in a rudimentary form from very early times; and the proof is
the fact generally recognised that magicians amongst the lowest races,
though they may believe to a certain extent in their own magical
powers, do practise a good deal of magic which they themselves know to
be fraudulent. Progress takes place when other people also, and a {76}
steadily increasing number of people, come to see that it is fraudulent.

In the next place, just as amongst very primitive peoples we see that
some magic is known by some people, viz. the magicians themselves, to
be fraudulent, though other people believe in it; so, amongst very
primitive peoples, we find beliefs and practices existing which have
not yet come to be regarded as magical, though they are such as might
come, and do elsewhere come, to be considered pure magic. Thus, for
instance, when Cherokee Indians who suffer from rheumatism abstain from
eating the flesh of the common grey squirrel "because the squirrel eats
in a cramped position, which would clearly aggravate the pangs of the
rheumatic patient" (Frazer, _History of the Kingship_, p. 70), or when
"they will not wear the feathers of the bald-headed buzzard for fear of
themselves becoming bald" (_ib._), they are simply following the best
medical advice of their day,--they certainly do not imagine they are
practising magic, any more than you or I do when we are following the
prescriptions of our medical adviser. On the contrary, it is quite as
obvious, then, that the feathers of the bald-headed buzzard are
infectious as it is now that the clothes {77} of a fever patient are
infectious. Neither proposition, to be accepted as true, requires us
to believe in magic: either might spring up where magic had never been
heard of. And, if that is the case, it simply complicates things
unnecessarily to talk of magic in such cases. The tendency to believe
that like produces like is not a consequence of or a deduction from a
belief in magic: on the contrary, magic has its root or one of its
roots in that tendency of the human mind. But though that tendency
helps to produce magic amongst other things, magic is not the only
thing which it produces: it produces beliefs such as those of the
Cherokees just quoted, which are no more magical than the belief that
fire produces warmth, or that _causa aequat effectum_, that an effect
is, when analysed, indistinguis