TRIBAL SOCIETY 263 



This rite is supposed to increase the number of the grubs 

 and give the people a larger food supply. 48 



The Indian medicine-men perform certain magical 

 practices which are supposed to effect the well-being of 

 their friends or enemies. Their supernatural powers 

 are also invoked to cure disease and sickness. But the 

 savage's notion of disease, of the cause of illness, is es- 

 sentially different from the modern man's understanding 

 of it. To the savage, a disease or sickness is always evi- 

 dence that the victim is possessed by an evil spirit or that 

 he has been bewitched by evil magic. If a wound bleeds 

 excessively, it may be thought that some malignant spirit 

 is sucking the blood of the injured person. Chants, ac- 

 companied by the beating of drums, are undertaken with 

 the idea that by these means the evil spirit may be fright- 

 ened away and the bleeding stopped. Sometimes a sav- 

 age dreams that one of the medicine-men has got some of 

 his hair, or a piece of his food or clothing, or indeed any- 

 thing that he has used. Should he dream this several 

 times he feels sure that it is so, and he calls his friends 

 together and tells them that he has been dreaming about 

 a man who must have something belonging to him. His 

 friends go and ask the man if he has anything belonging 

 to the other. The medicine-man usually denies it, but 

 if he sees no other way out of it he makes the excuse 

 that he has something that he is burning, but that it was 

 given him to burn, and that he did not know to whom it 

 belonged. In such a case he will give the thing to the 

 friends of the sick man, telling them to put it in water 

 to put the fire out ; and when this has been done, the man 

 will probably feel better. Sometimes a medicine-man 

 may suck an evil spirit out of an affected part, thus effect- 



48 Hid. 



