Fida negroes sent to consult their divine snake through a priest when ill, and the priest (unless he announced that the disease would be fatal) received a reward for indicating the remedies to be used. Moreover, the priests were the physicians of the negroes. Two theories prevailed among the people as to the origin of illnesses. Some tribes held them to be due to evil spirits, who were accordingly driven away by a prescribed system of armed pursuit. But the priests in other places regarded them as a consequence of discord between spirit and soul, and required the patient in the first instance to confess his sins. This being done, they obtain from their deity an indication of the offerings to be made, or the vows to be fulfilled, to restore mental harmony. They then undertook the treatment of the body by physical means (G. d. M., pp. 335, 336). In Sierra Leone, as in other parts of Africa, "the practice of medicine, and the art of making greegrees and fetishes, in other words, amulets . . . is generally the province of the same person." Those who practice medicine are looked upon as witches, and believed not only to converse with evil spirits, but to exercise control over them (N. A., vol. i. p. 251). In New France, in the eighteenth century, the principal occupation of the native priests was medicine (N. F. vol. iii. p. 364). In Mexico, the people came from all parts to the priests to be annointed with the peculiar ungent used in the special consecration mentioned above (Supra, p. 116). This they termed a "divine physic," and considered as a cure for their diseases (H. I., b. 5, ch. 26).
Such rude notions as these, implying a supernatural as opposed to a natural thory of the physical conditions of the body, are not wholly extinct even among ourselves. They exist, like so many of the crude conceptions of the savage, in the form of respected survivals wholly inconsistent with our practical habits. True, we do not call in the clergyman to assist or to direct at the sick-bed. But we do ask him to put up prayers for the recovery of the sick; and in the case of royal princes, the clergy throughout the land are set to work to induce the divine Being to give their illnesses a favorable turn. Now, this proceeding, however disguised under refined and imposing forms, is practically on a level with that of the Amazulu, who seeks to pacify the offended spirit that has attacked him with pain by the sac-
