There is no, "medicine," no "devil," in them.

If they are to be made supernaturally potent, they must be specially charmed.
But it is quite otherwise with his spear-thrower or his bull-roarer.
The former for no obvious reason enables him to throw his spear extraordinarily far.

(I have myself seen an Australian spear, with the help of the spear-thrower, fly a hundred and fifty yards, and strike true and deep at the end of its flight.) The latter emits the noise of thunder, though a mere chip of wood on the end of a string.

These, then, are in themselves "medicine." There is "virtue" in, or behind, them.
Is, then, to attribute "virtue" the same thing, necessarily, as to attribute vitality?
Are the spear-thrower and the bull-roarer inevitably thought of as alive?
Or are they, as a matter of course, endowed with soul or spirit?
Or may there be also an impersonal kind of "virtue," "medicine," or whatever the wonder-working power in the wonder-working thing is to be called?
Now there is evidence that the savage himself, in speaking about these matters, sometimes says power, sometimes vitality, sometimes spirit.

But the simplest way of disposing of these questions is to remember that such fine distinctions as these, which theorists may seek to draw, do not appeal at all to the savage himself.