90 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 99 



me 5 per cent of what ho knew on this score; ultimately I extracted 

 all he knew — and a bulky lot it was — b}^ indirect and roundabout 

 questions. 



Even a hasty perusal of the disease names (cf. the texts) and of the 

 curing methods (sec p. 60) will soon sliow that their anatomical knowl- 

 edge is very scanty. It lias boon said that people living in primitive 

 communities, especially those who have to rely on hunting for their 

 sustenance, manage to derive pretty sound and tolerably accurate 

 ideas about the structure and function of internal organs from analogy 

 of the anatomy of killed and dressed animals. 



This, however, does not follow. The hunter who cuts up the gamo 

 in the forest, to bring home the better morsels, is not engrossed in 

 anatomical speculation, and his wife who disembowels the rabbit or 

 tlie groundhog is too anxious to have the meat barbecuing before the 

 lire to be able to aiford the time for scientific observation. 



Even a people who practiced to such a considerable degree the 

 dissecting of corpses for embalming piu-poses as the Egyptians are 

 known to have long remained sadly ignorant of any anatomical 

 knowledge worthj^ of such a name; yet thej^ had the advantage of 

 laboratory work all the time. 



A medicine man who coidd write, and whom I asked to draw ''the 

 inside of a man' ' in an oTitline which I had sketched, put a dot about 

 the throat, and said, "this is where our saliva is"^*; about the height 

 of the sternum, a small circle, with a lozenge on either side of it, which 

 he proclaimed to be the heart with the liver around it, and the kidneys ; 

 he put the navel approxhnately in the right position, and drew a line 

 above it which was to represent the diaphragm; having drawn another 

 circle mider the navel, which he pronounced to be the bowels, he laid 

 down the pencil with a sk/cwo" nt'co-.o"' ("this is all there is to it") 

 which so\mded as if he were highly satisfied with his feat. 



Arteries, sinews, and tendons are all held to be one and the same 

 thing; in fact, there is only one word to refer to any of these: 

 tsyVaDi;-'no°. Nothing seems to be known about the function of the 

 blood. 



A final remark I want to mal^e on this score is, that in spite of their 

 vast amount of erudition, and, in some cases, of their superior intelli- 

 gence, these old fellows do not seem to be any more methodical than 

 their lay congeners. Although a call is made on tliem three or four 

 times a week, they will persist in walking, or rather, climbing miles 

 and miles in the mountains each time, hunting for the herbs and roots 

 which they need for their prescriptions, instead of transplanting a 

 specimen near their own cabin, and laying out a garden of "officinal 

 plants" such as Charlemagne ordered the medieval monks to do. 



" Sec p. 15. 



