civilised man, the need of making the world intelligible, and he is active in his search for causes and effects. There is much "speculation in these eyes that he doth glare withal." This is a statement which has been denied by some persons who have lived with savages. Thus Mr. Bates, in his Naturalist on the Amazon,[1] writes: "Their want of curiosity is extreme. . . . Vicente" (an Indian companion) "did not know the cause of thunder and lightning. I asked him who made the sun, the stars, the trees. He didn't know, and had never heard the subject mentioned in his tribe." But Mr. Bates admits that even Vicente had a theory of the configuration of the world. "The necessity of a theory of the earth and water had been felt, and a theory had been suggested." Again, Mr. Bates says about a certain Brazilian tribe, "Their sluggish minds seem unable to conceive or feel the want of a theory of the soul;" and he thinks the cause of this indolence is the lack "of a written language or a leisured class." Now savages, as a rule, are all in the "leisured class," all sportsmen. Mr. Herbert Spencer, too, has expressed scepticism about the curiosity attributed to savages. The point is important, because, in our view, the medicine-man's powers are rooted in the savage theory of things, and if the savage is too sluggish to invent or half consciously evolve a theory of things, our hypothesis is baseless. Again, we expect to find in savage myths the answer given by savages to their own questions. But this
- ↑ Vol. ii. p. 162.
