3. A NEW NATURE THROUGH NEW BLOOD. It was a primeval idea, of universal sway, that the taking in of another’s blood was the acquiring of another’s life, with all that was best in that other’s nature. It was not merely that the taking away of blood was the taking away of life; but that the taking in of blood was the taking in of life, and of all that that life represented. Here, again, the heart, as the fountain of blood, and so, as the centre and source of life, was preeminently the agency of transfer, in the acquiring of a new nature. Herodotus tells us of this idea in the far East, twenty-four centuries ago. When a Scythian, he said, killed his first man in open warfare, he drank in his blood, as a means of absorbing his fairly acquired life; and the heads of as many as he slew, the Scythian carried in triumph to the king;[256] as the American Indian bears away the scalps of his slain, to-day. Modern historians, indeed, show us other resemblances than this, between the aboriginal American and the ancient Scythian. The Jesuit founder of the Huron Mission to the American Indians, “its truest hero, and its greatest martyr,” was Jean de Brébeuf. After a heroic life among a savage people, he was subjected to frightful torture, and to the crudest death. His character had won the admiration of those who felt that duty to their gods demanded his martyrdom; and his bearing under torture exalted him in their esteem, as heroic beyond compare. “He came of a noble race,” says Parkman,[257]--“the same [race], it is said, from which sprang the English Earls of Arundel; but never had the mailed barons of his line confronted a fate so appalling, with so prodigious a constancy. To the last he refused to flinch, and ‘his death was an astonishment to his murderers.’” “We saw no part of his body,” wrote an eye witness,[258] “from head to foot, which was not burned [while he was yet living], even to his eyes, in the sockets of which these wretches had placed live coals.” Such manhood as he displayed under these tortures, the Indians could appreciate. Such courage and constancy as his, they longed to possess for themselves. When, therefore, they perceived that the brave and faithful man of God was finally sinking into death, they sprang toward him, scalped him, “laid open his breast, and came in a crowd to drink the blood of so valiant an enemy; thinking to imbibe with it some portion of his courage. A chief then tore out his heart, and devoured it.”