72 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Sacrifice. Man once imagined forces superior to himself, who yet 

 could be invoked and moved to and from any purpose. The divine 

 world was produced in his own image, and he treated its gods as 

 he liked to be treated by his inferiors. He believed that the way 

 to placate the forces surrounding him was to win them over as men 

 are won over, by making presents to them. This clearly continued 

 among the Israelites until the eighth century b. c, but it is to be 

 regarded as a stage succeeding a former condition of zoolatry and 

 totemism, without notice of which its details can not be understood. 



Most people sacrificed to their divinities plants, fruits, and herbs, 

 and animals taken from their flocks. People who had no domes- 

 tic animals offered those taken in the hunt. The Indians offered 

 the maize from their fields and the animals of the chase, and threw 

 into the fire or water tobacco, or other herbs which they used in 

 the place of tobacco. Sometimes these objects were hung up in 

 the air above their huts. The northern Algonquins tied living 

 dogs to high rods, and let them expire. In a similar manner other 

 Indians stuck up a deer, especially a white deer, on poles. The 

 plains tribes gave the same elevation to the head or skin of an 

 albino buffalo on mounds, not having poles convenient. The spot- 

 less red heifer of the Israelites may be compared with the spotless 

 white animals of the chase. 



The southern Indians always threw a small piece of the fattest 

 of the meat into the fire when eating or before they began to eat. 

 They commonly pulled their newly killed venison several times 

 through the smoke of the fire perhaps as a sacrifice, and perhaps 

 to consume the life-spirit of the animal. They also burned a large 

 piece and sometimes the whole carcass of the first buck they 

 killed, either in the winter or the summer hunt. The Muskoki 

 burn a piece of every deer they kill. 



The Israelites offered daily sacrifice, in which a lamb (except 

 the skin and entrails) was burned to ashes. In some of their sac- 

 rifices there was not only distinction between animals that were 

 fit and unfit, but in the manner of treatment. Sometimes the vic- 

 tim was not to be touched, but should be entirely consumed by 

 fire. In others the blood should be sprinkled around the altar 

 and the fat and the entrails burned, the remainder of the body to 

 be eaten by the priests. But it was a crime to eat flesh that had 

 been offered in sacrifice to a false god i. e., god of another people. 



The offering of the first-fruits, and therefore of the first-born, 

 to the divinity, was one of the oldest ideas of the Semites. Moloch 

 and Jahveh were conceived as being the fire, devouring whatever 

 was offered to it, so that to give to the fire was to give to the god. 

 In time, a substitute was suggested ; the first-born was replaced 

 by an animal or a sum of money. This was called the " money of 

 the lives." 



