260 WARFARE IN THE HUMAN BODY 



bad sense, and from <p'spw axog when used in a good 

 one. One does not always, even nowadays, get much 

 help from those who ought to know. When my theory 

 was submitted to one well-known Orientalist he said 

 that the older or classical form of vourmak was ourmak. 

 He was, of course, wrong. He was an authority on the 

 Semitic languages, but evidently knew little of Turkish. 

 It is impossible to speak of it as an old form when all 

 existing Turkish documents, being in the Arabian char- 

 acter, must necessarily be subsequent to the eighth 

 century, when the Turks of the Khanates were endowed 

 simultaneously with Islam and the Persi- Arabic alphabet. 

 Nor do I understand how he could have thought ourmak 

 could have been degraded into the popular form vourmak. 

 According to all philologic knowledge, any degradation 

 would have been in the opposite direction. It may be 

 noted that as there is no Arabic character to represent the 

 v sound the Turks use the wau for this purpose. There 

 are, in fact, hundreds of words in Turkish beginning with 

 a v sound and thousands in which the v is incorporated. 

 They are all represented by the Arabic wau. 



In this paper I have not troubled to speak about the 

 actual meaning of the Pharmakos ceremony. Professor 

 Murray seems wedded to the belief that it was in every 

 case a mimema. On the other hand, Sir James Frazer 

 is equally certain that even in civilized Greece the Thar- 

 gelian rites took darker forms than the mere expulsion of 

 this quasi-religious outcast when he was beaten with agnus 

 castus or squills and expelled from the city. Certainly, 

 the derivation which I offer seems on the surface to support 

 Professor Murray's contention. But the general body of 

 anthropological lore on this subject points steadily to 

 darker customs which may have been resurrected in 



