some way to avoid these, our race must have come to disaster. In
point of fact, he did learn to avoid them; and such evidence
implied, as has been said, an elementary knowledge of toxicology.

Coupled with this knowledge of things dangerous to the human
system, there must have grown up, at a very early day, a belief
in the remedial character of various vegetables as agents to
combat disease. Here, of course, was a rudimentary therapeutics,
a crude principle of an empirical art of medicine. As just
suggested, the lower order of animals have an instinctive
knowledge that enables them to seek out remedial herbs (though we
probably exaggerate the extent of this instinctive knowledge);
and if this be true, man must have inherited from his prehuman
ancestors this instinct along with the others. That he extended
this knowledge through observation and practice, and came early
to make extensive use of drugs in the treatment of disease, is
placed beyond cavil through the observation of the various
existing barbaric tribes, nearly all of whom practice elaborate
systems of therapeutics. We shall have occasion to see that even
within historic times the particular therapeutic measures
employed were often crude, and, as we are accustomed to say,
unscientific; but even the crudest of them are really based upon
scientific principles, inasmuch as their application implies the
deduction of principles of action from previous observations.
Certain drugs are applied to appease certain symptoms of disease
because in the belief of the medicine-man such drugs have proved
beneficial in previous similar cases.

All this, however, implies an appreciation of the fact that man
is subject to "natural" diseases, and that if these diseases are
not combated, death may result. But it should be understood that
the earliest man probably had no such conception as this.
Throughout all the ages of early development, what we call
"natural" disease and "natural" death meant the onslaught of a
tangible enemy. A study of this question leads us to some very
curious inferences. The more we look into the matter the more the
thought forces itself home to us that the idea of natural death,
as we now conceive it, came to primitive man as a relatively late
scientific induction. This thought seems almost startling, so
axiomatic has the conception "man is mortal" come to appear. Yet
a study of the ideas of existing savages, combined with our
knowledge of the point of view from which historical peoples
regard disease, make it more probable that the primitive
conception of human life did not include the idea of necessary
death. We are told that the Australian savage who falls from a
tree and breaks his neck is not regarded as having met a natural
death, but as having been the victim of the magical practices of
the "medicine-man" of some neighboring tribe. Similarly, we shall
find that the Egyptian and the Babylonian of the early historical
period conceived illness as being almost invariably the result of
the machinations of an enemy. One need but recall the
superstitious observances of the Middle Ages, and the yet more
recent belief in witchcraft, to realize how generally disease has
been personified as a malicious agent invoked by an unfriendly
mind. Indeed, the phraseology of our present-day speech is still
reminiscent of this; as when, for example, we speak of an "attack
of fever," and the like.

When, following out this idea, we picture to ourselves the
conditions under which primitive man lived, it will be evident at
once how relatively infrequent must have been his observation of
what we usually term natural death. His world was a world of
strife; he lived by the chase; he saw animals kill one another;
he witnessed the death of his own fellows at the hands of
enemies. Naturally enough, then, when a member of his family was
"struck down" by invisible agents, he ascribed this death also to
violence, even though the offensive agent was concealed.
Moreover, having very little idea of the lapse of time--being
quite unaccustomed, that is, to reckon events from any fixed
era--primitive man cannot have gained at once a clear conception
of age as applied to his fellows. Until a relatively late stage
of development made tribal life possible, it cannot have been
usual for man to have knowledge of his grandparents; as a rule he
did not know his own parents after he had passed the adolescent
stage and had been turned out upon the world to care for himself.
If, then, certain of his fellow-beings showed those evidences of
infirmity which we ascribe to age, it did not necessarily follow
that he saw any association between such infirmities and the
length of time which those persons had lived. The very fact that
some barbaric nations retain the custom of killing the aged and
infirm, in itself suggests the possibility that this custom arose
before a clear conception had been attained that such drags upon
the community would be removed presently in the natural order of
things. To a person who had no clear conception of the lapse of
time and no preconception as to the limited period of man's life,
the infirmities of age might very naturally be ascribed to the
repeated attacks of those inimical powers which were understood
sooner or later to carry off most members of the race. And
coupled with this thought would go the conception that inasmuch
as some people through luck had escaped the vengeance of all
their enemies for long periods, these same individuals might
continue to escape for indefinite periods of the future. There
were no written records to tell primeval man of events of long
ago. He lived in the present, and his sweep of ideas scarcely
carried him back beyond the limits of his individual memory. But
memory is observed to be fallacious. It must early have been
noted that some people recalled events which other participants
in them had quite forgotten, and it may readily enough have been
inferred that those members of the tribe who spoke of events
which others could not recall were merely the ones who were


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