The biologist and psychologist may find material to demonstrate to what extent primitive man, in corresponding environment in different regions of the world, will display the same instincts and act under identical impulses.
The student of comparative mythology will certainly discover much to interest and instruct him.
The student of folk-lore should find here a field promising the most prolific results. Folk-usage, especially in folk-medicine,—which is simply the crystallization of the mythology and religious medicine of the most primitive ages,—should respond most generously to any demands that may be made upon this and other points which the ordinary writer believes to be too unclean for his pen.
To the author it has been a work involving apparently endless research, much of it barren of result, and a correspondence with scholars in all countries, whose contributions have been of the first importance in determining that the filthy rite of urine-drinking as seen among the Zuñis of the United States was paralleled by the orgies of other savages, and had its counterparts and imitations in the “survivals,” often distorted into burlesque, of nations of high enlightenment.
Verily, it may be said in concluding, as in beginning this volume, the proper study of mankind is man; the study of man is the study of man’s religion.
FOOTNOTES.
[1] John Baptist Pellegrini, who wrote an “Apologia ... adversus Philosophiæ et Medicinæ calumniatores,” at Bononiae (Bologna), 1582, uses only this expression, “Quamvis humanis corporis excrementa conspicienda considerandaque esse præcipiat non tamen propter hoc aliquid suæ nobilitati et proestantiæ detrahitur,” p. 190. He means that the nobility of the medical profession is in no manner impaired by the fact that the good physician examines the egestæ of his patient. “However disgusting the subject may appear to such readers who do not consider it in the light of science, the article is a fair specimen of the maxim that, for a scientific mind, nothing is too abject or insignificant for consideration; and it also illustrates the other principle, that to the pure everything is pure. Many of the rites described in these pages show how deeply engraved in the human mind is the tendency of symbolizing, anthromorphizing, and deifying abstract ideas and phenomena of nature.”—(Extract from review by Dr. Alfred Gatchett, Bureau of Ethnology, in “Folk-Lore Journal,” Boston, Mass.)
[2] Mr. Cushing’s reputation as an ethnologist is now so firmly established in two continents that no further reference to his self-sacrificing and invaluable labors in the cause of science seems to be necessary.
[3] “There are three secret orders in Zuñi,—the “Zuñi,” the “Knife,” and the “Nehue-Cue.” The object of the latter is said to be to teach fortitude to its members, as well as to teach them the therapeutics of stomachic disorders, etc. In their dances they resort to the horrible practice of drinking human urine, eating human excrement, animal excrement, and other nastiness which can only be believed by seeing it.”—(Extract from the Personal Notes of Captain Bourke, November 16, 1881.)
[4] “There must, I think, be some mistake about the fanatical dance of Arabian Bedouins; probably one of the wild practices of Moslem Dervishes was described in the source you have mislaid. These practices are Turkish or Persian, not Arabian, in origin. The Rifar Dervishes eat live serpents and scorpions, and, I dare say, perform still more disgusting acts.”—(Personal letter from Professor W. Robertson Smith, Christ’s College, Cambridge, England.)