Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/82

62 A Short History of The World to determine these desirable results. Another great concern of his was illness and death. Occasionally infections crept through the land and men died of them. Occasionally men were stricken by ill- ness and died or were enfeebled without any manifest cause. This too must have given the hasty, emotional mind of primitive man, much feverish exercise. Dreams and fantastic guesses made him blame this, or appeal for help to that man or beast or thing. He had the child's aptitude for fear and panic. Quite early in the little human tribe, older, steadier minds sharing the fears, sharing the imaginations, but a little more forceful than the others, must have asserted themselves, to advise, to prescribe, to com- mand. This they declared unpropitious and that imperative, this an omen of good and that an omen of evil. The expert in Fetish, the Medicine man, was the first priest. He exhorted, he interpreted dreams, he warned, he performed the comphcated hocus pocus that brought luck or averted calamity. Primitive religion was not so much what we now call religion as practice and observance, and the early priest dictated what was indeed an arbitrary primitive practical science.