PRACTICES TO OBTAIN CHILDREN 153 



purposes for which these objects would be employed 

 that of acting on the human organism would often 

 hold a prominent place. Until magic and religion 'are 

 differentiated from medicine the rites and observances 

 connected with their employment are vague and 

 indeterminate in their aspect, and the exact operation 

 of the objects employed is not even questioned. We 

 need not here discuss the relation between magic and 

 religion : it is at all events beyond doubt that they 

 have been intimately connected from the earliest times. 

 A very superficial examination of the history of 

 medicine suffices to show how tardy was the process of 

 its differentiation from both. To refer here only io 

 magic, medical treatises right down to the close of the 

 Middle Ages teem with prescriptions not merely value- 

 less in themselves for therapeutic action, but obviously 

 of magical origin. Nor are such prescriptions by any 

 means absent from medical treatises composed long 

 since the Revival of Learning; while the repertory 

 of the peasant-doctor abounds with them even yet. 

 Many of the practices recorded in the foregoing pages 

 belong to this class, and we must not be surprised if 

 they wear more or less of a medicinal aspect. They must 

 not however, be considered alone. Their medicinal 

 aspect is delusive. Their true connections are with a 

 much larger number of practices directed to the same 

 end and bearing no therapeutic interpretation. They 

 must be correlated with these, and not with these only 

 but with the stories of supernatural birth in which the 

 same or analogous means are employed for the same 

 purpose and are spoken of as the direct cause of birth 

 independent of the union of the sexes. Nor is this all. 

 These practices and stories must alsp be compared 



