IMAGES AND NAMES. 123 



single individual, but of a succession of deceased pei'sons who 

 have worn it in their time, so that it cannot be considered as 

 having in it much of the nature of a portait.^ Some New Zea- 

 landers, however, who were lately in London, were asked why 

 these tikis usually, if not always, have but three fingers on 

 their hands, and they replied that if an image is made of a 

 man, and any one should insult it, the afiront would have to be 

 revenged, and to avoid such a contingency the tihis were made 

 with only three fingers, so that, not being any one's image, 

 no one was bound to notice what happened to them. 



In medicine, the notion of the real connexion between object 

 and image has manifested itself widely in both ancient and 

 modern times. Pliny speaks of the folly of the magicians in 

 using the catanance {KaravdjKT), compulsion) for love-potions, 

 because it shrinks in drying into the shape of the claws of a 

 dead kite (and so, of course, holds the patient fast) ; but it 

 does not strike him that the virtues of the lithospermum or 

 '' stone-seed " in curing calculus were no doubt deduced in just 

 the same way.^ In more modern times, such notions as these 

 were elaborated into the old medical theory known as the 

 " Doctrine of Signatures,'' which supposed that plants and 

 minerals indicated by their external characters the diseases for 

 which nature had intended them as remedies. Thus the Eu- 

 phrasia or eye-bright was, and is, supposed to be good for the 

 eyes, on the strength of a black pupil-like spot in its corolla, 

 the yellow turmeric was thought good for jaundice, and the 

 blood-stone is probably used to this day for stopping blood.^ 

 By virtue of a similar association of ideas, the ginseng, which is 

 still largely used in China, was also employed by the Indians 

 of North America, and in both countries its virtues were de- 

 duced from the shape of the root, which is supposed to re- 

 semble the human body. Its Iroquois name, ahesoutclienza, 

 means " a child," while in China it is called jin-sevg, that is to 

 say, "resemblance of man."* 



1 Hale, in U. S. Exploring Exp. ; Philadelphia, vol. vi., 1846, p. 23. Eev. W. 

 Yate, ' Accoiint of New Zealand ;' London, 1835, p. 151. 



" PUn., xxvii. 35, 74. ^ Pai-is, ' Pharmacologia ;' London, 1843, p. 47. 



^ Charlevoix, vol. vi. p. 24. For a similar case, see the ' Penny Cyclopsedia,' 

 art. " Atropa Maudragora " (mandrake). 



