Burckhardt was so surprised at a trace of this idea in Nubia, that he could hardly credit the information concerning it; “although several persons asserted it to be a fact,” he says; “and he heard no one contradict it.”[272] As he learned it: “Among the Hallenga, who draw their origin from Abyssinia, a horrible custom is said to attend the revenge of blood. When the slayer has been seized by the relatives of the deceased, a family feast is proclaimed, at which the murderer is brought into the midst of them, bound upon an angareyg; and while his throat is slowly cut with a razor, the blood is caught in a bowl, and handed round amongst the guests; every one of whom is bound to drink of it, at the moment the victim breathes his last.” The forfeited life of the murderer here seems to be surrendered to, and formally appropriated by, the family, or clan, which he had, to the same extent, depleted of character and life. A practice not unlike this is reported of the Australians, in their avenging the blood of a murdered person. They devour their victims; who are selected from the tribe of the murderer, although they may be personally, innocent of the murder. The tribe depleted by the murder, replaces its loss by blood--which is life--from the tribe of the murderer. Indeed, “when any one of a tribe [in New South Wales] dies a natural death, it is usual to avenge [or to cancel] the loss of the deceased by taking blood from one or other of his friends.”[273] In this way, the very life and being of those whose blood is taken, go to restore to the bereaved ones the loss that death has brought to them. Strange as this idea may seem to us, its root-thought, as a fact, is still an open question in the realm of physiological science. The claim is positive, in medical works, that insanity has been cured by the transfusion of a sane man’s blood;[274] that a normal mind has been restored, through a normal life gained in new blood. Moreover, the question, how far the nature, or the characteristics, of an organism, are affected, in blood transfusion, by the nature, or the characteristics, of the donor of the transfused blood, is by no means a settled one among scientists. Referring to a series of questions in this line, propounded by Robert Boyle, more than two centuries ago, Roussel has said, within the past decade: “No one has been able to give any positive answers to them, based upon well-conducted operations”; and, “they still await solution in 1877, as in 1667.”[275] 4. LIFE FROM ANY BLOOD, AND BY A TOUCH.