

RELIGION 191 
has been shown to have originated in Babylonia. From 
there the custom spread with very little modification 
to surrounding parts of the world. Westward, it was 
carried practically without change to the Etruscans, and 
from this people the Romans derived it at an early 
date. Eastward, it was transported as far as China. 
The details of this long transmission remain to be 
worked out; but the correspondence of the minuter 
features of interpretation of the organ are so close, that 
there can be no question of the ultimate Babylonian 
source of the Chinese practice. 
For the East Indies, there is an even greater gap in our 
knowledge, but at least the general type of procedure 
is identical. With liver divination established as an 
intact custom among so advanced and conservative a 
people as the Chinese, it is almost certain that it must 
at some time or other have been introduced also into 
southeastern Asia; and once rooted there, there were a 
thousand opportunities for its spread to the East Indies. 
For augury the case is less complete; but the associa- 
tion between this form of foretelling and liver divina- 
tion both in pagan Rome and in the East Indies, sug- 
gests rather powerfully that the two allied sets of prac- 
tices have traveled over large parts of the world in 
company. ‘There is something characteristically non- 
Hindu about both of them; and yet it is entirely con- 
ceivable that these methods of divination may at some 
time have attached themselves rather externally to 
Hindu religion and have been transmitted along with it. 
It is not unlikely that they entered the East Indies 
and the Philippines in companionship with animal 
sacrifice. 
In any event, a vast perspective is opened up. The 
modern Filipino mountaineer and the Roman of twenty- 
five hundred years ago practised the same customs not 
