and vigorous
boyhood, its meditative youth, with consciousness of sin and endless
expiatory ritual in Nature's bosom, its fleeting visions of
salvation, and finally its complete disillusionment and despair in the
world-slaughter and unbelief of the twentieth century!

Leaving Wordsworth, however, and coming back to our main line of
thought, we may point out that while early peoples were intellectually
mere babies--with their endless yarns about heroes on horseback leaping
over wide rivers or clouds of monks flying for hundreds of miles
through the air, and their utter failure to understand the general
concatenations of cause and effect--yet practically and in their
instinct of life and destiny they were, as I have already said, by no
means fools; certainly not such fools as many of the arm-chair students
of these things delight to represent them. For just as, a few years
ago, we modern civilizees studying outlying nations, the Chinese for
instance, rejoiced (in our vanity) to pick out every quaint peculiarity
and absurdity and monstrosity of a supposed topsyturvydom, and failed
entirely to see the real picture of a great and eminently sensible
people; so in the case of primitive men we have been, and even still
are, far too prone to catalogue their cruelties and obscenities and
idiotic superstitions, and to miss the sane and balanced setting of
their actual lives.

Mr. R. R. Marett, who has a good practical acquaintance with his
subject, had in the Hibbert Journal for October 1918 an article on "The
Primitive Medicine Man" in which he shows that the latter is as a rule
anything but a fool and a knave--although like 'medicals' in all ages he
hocuspocuses his patients occasionally! He instances the medicine-man's
excellent management, in most cases, of childbirth, or of wounds and
fractures, or his primeval skill in trepanning or trephining--all of
which operations, he admits, may be accompanied with grotesque and
superstitious ceremonies, yet show real perception and ability. We all
know--though I think the article does not mention the matter--what a
considerable list there is of drugs and herbs which the modern art of
healing owes to the ancient medicine-man, and it may be again mentioned
that one of the most up-to-date treatments--the use of a prolonged and
exclusive diet of MILK as a means of giving the organism a new start
in severe cases--has really come down to us through the ages from this
early source. (1) The