Burton has called attention to the fact that among the Arabs, “the liver and the spleen are both supposed to be ‘congealed blood,’” and that the Bed´ween of the Hejaz justify their eating of locusts, which belong to an “unclean” class of animals, and of liver which represents forbidden blood, by this couplet: “We are allowed two carrions, and two bloods, The fish and locust, the liver and the spleen.”[686] He has also noted that the American Indian partakes of the liver, as well as of the heart of a fallen enemy, in order to the assimilating of the enemy’s life;[687] and he finds many correspondences between the desert dwellers of America and of Arabia. “The [American] ‘brave,’” he says, “stamps a red hand upon his mouth to show that he has drunk the blood of a foe. Of the Utaybah ‘Harami,’ it is similarly related, that after mortal combat, he tastes the dead man’s gore.”[688] Even in modern English, the word “liver” has been thought by many to represent “life” or “blood.” Thus, in one of our dictionaries we are told that the word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon and the Scandinavian verb “to live,” “because [the liver is] of so great importance to _life_, or animal vitality.”[689] In another, its derivation is ascribed to _lopper_, and _lapper_, “to coagulate,” “from its resemblance to a mass of clotted blood.”[690] Among the aborigines of America the prominence given to the blood and to the heart was as great, and as distinctly marked, as among the peoples of ancient Egypt, or any other portion of the far East. This truth has been brought out most fully by the valuable personal researches of Mr. Frank H. Cushing, of the Smithsonian Institution, into the mythology and sociology of the Zuñis of New Mexico. From his reports it would appear that, according to the priests of that people, “all true fetiches [or, material symbols of spiritual existences] are either actual petrifactions of the animals they represent, or were such originally”--according as the present form of the fetish is natural, or is mechanically fashioned. These rude stone images of the animals of prey, “which are of course mere concretions or strangely eroded rock forms,” are supposed to be the shriveled and distorted remains of beings which were long ago turned to stone. Within these fetishes the _heart_ of the original animal still exists; (“his heart still lives, even though his person be changed to stone”;) and it needs for its sustenance the blood, or the “life fluid,” of the game which was, from the beginning, the ordinary prey of that animal. Hence each fetish is pleased to hear the prayers and to give success to the hunting of its present possessor, in order to the obtaining of the life fluid which is essential to its nourishing.