Among the northern Indian tribes some faint traces of the annual festival of fire are discernible. At the sacrifice of the white dog, the New Year’s festival of the Iroquois, the proceedings extended over six days; and such were the obligations which its rites imposed on all, that if any member of a family died during the period, the body was laid aside, and the relatives participated in the games as well as the religious ceremonies. The strangling of the white dog destined for sacrifice was the chief feature of the first day’s proceedings. On the second day the two keepers of the faith visited each house, and performed the significant ceremony of stirring the ashes on the hearth, accompanied with a thanksgiving to the Great Spirit. On the morning of the fifth day the fire was solemnly kindled by friction; and the white dog was borne in procession on a bark litter, until the officiating leaders halted, facing the rising sun, when it was laid on the flaming wood and consumed, during an address, which included a special thanksgiving to the sun, for having looked on the earth with a beneficent eye.[63] There is, perhaps, no connection traceable between the various rites thus described; for it would be easy to find their parallels among ancient and modern nations. They pertained to the religious practices of the Chaldeans, to the rites of Baal, and to other early forms of idolatry. Sabaism is indeed the most natural form of false worship, commending itself by many visible tokens, as of a divine influence and power, to uninstructed man; and readily suggests the association of fire with the sun as its source. “Take ye good heed unto yourselves,” says the lawgiver of Israel to the tribes in the wilderness, “for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire; lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldst be driven to worship them.” This worship of the sun, though associated with ancient rites of Asiatic nations, is not therefore necessarily an evidence of the eastern origin either of the faith or of the nations of the New World. But, in the services to which it gave rise there, we have, at least, suggestive hints of the links that bind together its own ancient and modern tribes. Perhaps also they may supply a clew to the interpretation of some of the obscure sculptures still remaining on sites of the extinct native civilisation of America, and of rites once practised amid the sacred enclosures, and on the altar-mounds which give such peculiar interest to the river-terraces of the Mississippi valley.