The use of confession and penance was known in the religious ceremonies of some of the American nations. Baptism was a religious ceremony with them, and the bodies of the dead were sprinkled with water. Vestal virgins were found in organized communities on both sides of the Atlantic; they were in each case pledged to celibacy, and devoted to death if they violated their vows. In both hemispheres the recreant were destroyed by being buried alive. The Peruvians, Mexicans, Central Americans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Hebrews each had a powerful hereditary priesthood. The Phoenicians believed in an evil spirit called Zebub; the Peruvians had a devil called Cupay. The Peruvians burnt incense in their temples. The Peruvians, when they sacrificed animals, examined their entrails, and from these prognosticated the future. I need not add that all these nations preserved traditions of the Deluge; and all of them possessed systems of writing. The Egyptian priest of Sais told Solon that the myth of Phaëthon, the son of Helios, having attempted to drive the chariot of the sun, and thereby burning up the earth, referred to "a declination of the bodies moving round the earth and in the heavens" (comets), which caused a "great conflagration upon the earth," from which those only escaped who lived near rivers and seas. The "Codex Chimalpopoca"--a Nahua, Central American record--tells us that the third era of the world, or "third sun," is called, Quia Tonatiuh, or sun of rain, "because in this age there fell a rain of fire, all which existed burned, and there fell a rain of gravel;" the rocks "boiled with tumult, and there also arose the rocks of vermilion color." In other words, the traditions of these people go back to a great cataclysm of fire, when the earth possibly encountered, as in the Egyptian story, one of "the bodies moving round the earth and in the heavens;" they had also memories of "the Drift Period," and of the outburst of Plutonic rocks. If man has existed on the earth as long as science asserts, he must have passed through many of the great catastrophes which are written upon the face of the planet; and it is very natural that in myths and legends he should preserve some recollection of events so appalling and destructive.