intimacy with which name and object have grown together in the savage mind, to cite the practice of exchanging names, which was found in the West Indies at the time of Columbus,[1] and in the South Seas by Captain Cook, who was called Oree, while his friend Oree went by the name of Cookee.[2] But Cadwallader Colden's account of his new name is admirable evidence of what there is in a name in the mind of the savage. "The first Time I was among the Mohawks, I had this Compliment from one of their old Sachems, which he did, by giving me his own Name, Cayenderongue. He had been a notable Warrior; and he told me, that now I had a Right to assume to myself all the Acts of Valour he had performed, and that now my Name would echo from Hill to Hill over all the Five Nations." When Colden went back into the same part ten or twelve years later, he found that he was still known by the name he had thus received, and that the old chief had taken another.[3]
Taking a still wider stretch, the power of association grasps not only the spoken word, but its written representative. It has been seen how the Hindoo sorcerers wrote the name of their victim on the breast of the image made to personate him. A Chinese physician, if he has not got the drug he requires for his patient, will write the prescription on a piece of paper, and let the sick man swallow its ashes, or an infusion of the writing, in water.[4] This practice is no doubt very old, and may even descend from the time when the picture-element in Chinese writing, now almost effaced, was still clearly distinguishable, so that the patient would at least have the satisfaction of eating a picture, not a mere written word. Whether the Moslems got the idea from them or not, I do not know, but among them a verse of the Koran washed off into water and drunk, or even water from a cup in which it is engraved, is
- ↑ 'Letters of Columbus' (Hakluyt Soc.); London, 1847, p. 217. Rochefort, 'Iles Antilles;' Rotterdam, 1658, p. 458.
- ↑ Cook, First Voy. H, vol. ii. p. 251. Second Voyage; London, 2nd edit., 1777, vol. i. p. 167. See Dumont d'Urville, 'Voy. de l'Astrolabe,' vol. i. p. 189 (Australia).
- ↑ Colden, 'Hist. of the Five Indian Nations of Canada;' London, 1747, part i p. 10.
- ↑ Davis, vol. ii. p. 215.
