368 OF PECULIAR CUSTOMS. 



dragged, like a victim of Spanish civil war, back- 

 wards to his doom, and a prayer of peace being 

 muttered by the clerk, Walderheros, the high priest, 

 the misselannee, cut the throat of their prey, the 

 invocation of the Trinity, like the Islam " ul 

 Allah/' sanctifying the bloody business of depriving 

 an animal of life. 



It is singular to observe the pertinacity of 

 custom, and how characteristic of descent parti- 

 cular habits and ceremonies become long after the 

 separation of different nations from their original 

 root. The Arabs, the Amhara, or the Abyssinians, 

 and the Jews, all precede the slaughter of animals 

 for food with some short prayer, which, differing in 

 form, is still the same custom, and which, I think, 

 originated at a period antecedent to their dispersion as 

 different nations into the several countries they now 

 occupy. It has also continued among them, even 

 changed as these nations are in religion and social 

 character, the Hebrew trader, the Arab nomade 

 shepherd, and the Abyssinian agriculturist. Jew, 

 Mahomedan, and Christian, still retain this evidence 

 of a common origin, but which marks an ethnolo- 

 gical era posterior, I believe, by many centuries to 

 the more general custom of circumcision common to 

 all these people, and to many other African nations.* 



* A singular fact connected with this custom of making a short 

 prayer, whilst slaughtering the victim, I gathered from a note in a 

 recent edition of " Sale's Koran." It appears that by a decision of 

 those learned in the law, which is laid down in that book, animals 



