IMAGES AND NAMES. 127 



has been seen how the Hindoo sorcerers wrote the name of 

 their victim on the breast of the image made to personate him. 

 A Chinese physician, if he has not got the drug he requires 

 for his patient, will write the prescription on a piece of paper, 

 and let the sick man swallow its ashes, or an infusion of the 

 writing, in water.^ This practice is no doubt very old, and 

 may even descend from the time when the picture-element in 

 Chinese writing, now almost effaced, was still clearly distin- 

 guishable, so that the patient would at least have the satisfac- 

 tion of eating a picture, not a mere written word. Whether 

 the Moslems got the idea from them or not, I do not know, 

 but among them a verse of the Koran washed ofi" into water 

 and drunk, or even water from a cup in which it is engraved, 

 is an efficacious remedy.^ Here the connexion between the 

 two ends of the chain is very remote indeed. The arbitrary 

 characters, which represent the sound of the word, which re- 

 presents the idea, have to do duty for the idea itself. The 

 example is a striking one, and will serve to measure the 

 strength of the tendency of the uneducated mind to give an 

 outward material reality to its own inward processes. 



This confusion of objective with subjective connexion, which 

 shows itself so uniform in principle, though so various in details, 

 in the practices upon images and names, done with a view of 

 acting through them on their originals or their owners, may be 

 applied to explain one branch after another of the arts of the 

 sorcerer and diviner, till it almost seems as though we were 

 coming near the end of his list, and might set down practices 

 not based on this mental process, as exceptions to a general 

 rule. 



When a lock of hair is cut off as a memorial, the subjective 

 connexion between it and its former owner, is not severed. 

 In the mind of the friend who treasures it up, it recalls thoughts 

 of his presence, it is still something belonging to him. We 

 know, however, that the objective connexion was cut by the 

 scissors, and that what is done to that hair afterwards, is not 



' Davis, vol. ii. p. 215. 



2 Lane, Mod. Eg., vol. i. p. 347-8. Petherick, Egypt, etc. j Edinburgh, 1861, 

 p. 221. 



