In these ceremonies, it is evident that the Zuñis, like the Orientals, recognize the blood as the life, the heart as the epitome of life, the liver as a congealed mass of blood, and the transference of blood as the transference of life. Moreover, there is here a trace of that idea of the revivifying, by blood-bathing, of a being that had turned into stone; which is found in the legends of Arabia, and of the Norseland (See page 119 f., _supra_). Is there not, indeed, a reference to this world-wide figure of the living stone, in the Apostle’s suggestion, that those who were counted as worthless stones by an ignorant world are vivified by the renewing blood of Christ, and so are shown to be a holy people? “As new born babes [renewed by the blood of Christ], long for the spiritual milk [the means of sacred nourishment] which is without guile, that ye may grow thereby unto salvation; if ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious [if, indeed, ye have been made alive by the touch of his blood]: unto whom coming, [unto Him who is] a Living Stone rejected indeed of men, but with God [who knows the possibilities of that Stone], precious,--ye also, as living stones [as new blood-vivified petrifactions], are built up a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer up holy sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”[692] There is another gleam of this idea of the stones vivified by blood, in a custom reported from among the Indians of British Columbia, in a private letter written by a careful observer of Indian habits and ceremonies. When the Indian girls arrived at the years of womanhood they were accustomed, there as in many other parts of the world, to pass through a formal initiation into a new stage of existence. Going apart by themselves, at some distance from their settlements, they would lacerate their bodies, in order that blood might flow freely; and, laying a series of stones in a row, they would walk over them, allowing their blood to fall upon them. The young woman who could cover the largest number of stones with her blood, had the fairest prospect in life, in the line of a woman’s peculiar mission. This certainly would be a not unnatural thought as an outgrowth of the belief that stones anointed with freely surrendered blood, can be made to have life in themselves. It is much the same in war as in the hunt, among the Zuñis. “As with the hunter, so with the warrior; the fetich is fed on the life-blood of the slain.”[693] And here, again, is a link of connection between cannibalism and religious worship. Another illustration of the preeminence given to the heart, as the epitome of the very being itself, is the fact that the animals pictured on the pottery of these people, and of neighboring peoples, commonly had the rude conventional figure of a heart represented in its place on each animal; as if to show that the animal was living, and that it had a living soul.[694]