ster Helen_, has made this example of imitative
magic fairly familiar to those who would probably never otherwise have
heard of it.

"Why did you melt your waxen man,
Sister Helen?
To-day is the third since you began."

{49}

"The time was long, yet the time ran,
Little brother."
"Oh, the waxen knave was plump to-day,
Sister Helen;
Now like dead folk he has dropped away!"
"Nay now, of the dead what can you say,
Little brother?"

There are many other curious instances of imitative magic. A Bavarian
peasant in sowing wheat will sometimes wear a golden ring, in order
that the corn may have a fine yellow color. Similarly, in many parts
of Germany and Austria, the peasant imagines that he makes the flax
grow tall by dancing or leaping high, or by jumping backwards from a
table. Telepathic action, or action at a distance, was constantly
believed in. The hunter's wife abstained from spinning for fear the
game should turn and wind like the spindle and the hunter be unable to
hit it.

While imitative magic works through fancied resemblance, contagious
magic is based on the principle that what has once been together must
remain forever after in a sympathetic relation, so that what is done to
one affects the other. In Sussex some forty years ago a maid servant
remonstrated strongly against the throwing away of children's cast
teeth, affirming that should they be found and gnawed by any animal,
the child's new tooth would be, for all the world, like the teeth of
the animal that had bitten the old one. It was quite the custom in
former years to anoint the sword which wounded a man instead of the
wound itself. In Bryden's play, _The Tempest_, Ariel directs Prospero
to anoint the sword which wounded Hippolite and to wrap it up close
from the air. Footprints, pieces of {50} clothing, pictures, locks of
hair, all are connected with the individual and what is done to them
reacts on the individual no matter where he is.

At first, mankind resorted to magic as naturally as we resort to the
information given us by science. There was nothing nefarious about it.
Not to use all the precautions in your power and employ all the means
you could think of was simply foolish. As time went on, however,
socially approved magic became distinguished from black magic or that
which it was wrong to resort to. But magic, like every other activity,
tended to become specialized. Certain perso