At the two extremes of the world, to-day, among the primitive Bed´ween of the Desert of Arabia, and among the primitive Indians of the prairies of North America, there lingers a trace of this world-wide idea, that the body of an offering covenanted to God by its blood, can be a means of inter-communion with God in its eating. Both the Bed´ween and the Indians connect in their minds the fact of sacrificing and of feasting; and they speak of the two things interchangeably. An Arab, when he makes a feast, speaks of sacrificing the animal which is the main feature of that feast. I saw an Arab wedding at Castle Nakhl, on the Arabian Desert. The bridegroom sacrificed a young dromedary in honor of the occasion, and to furnish, as it were, the sacramental feast. The blood of the victim was poured out unto the Lord, by being buried in the earth--as the Chinese bury the blood of their sacrifices in the Temple of Heaven. Portions of the dromedary were eaten by all the guests, and a portion was sent to the stranger encamping near them. And that is the common method of Arab sacrificing and feasting. There is much of similarity in the ways of the Arabs and of the Indians. The Indian feasts are largely feasts of inter-communion with the gods. Whether it were the human victim, of former times, whose blood was drunk and whose heart was eaten, as preliminary to the feasting on his entire remains;[372] or, whether it be the preserved hearts and tongues of the buffaloes, which now form the basis of some of the sacred feasts of the Indians;[373]--the idea of divine-human inter-communion was and is inseparable from the idea of the feast. The first portion of the feast is always proffered to the spirits, in order to make it, in a peculiar sense, a sacred feast. Then, each person having a part in the feast is expected to eat the full share assigned to him;[374] unless indeed he be permitted to carry a remainder of it away “as sacred food” for the benefit of the others.[375] And so the common root-idea shows itself, in lesser or in larger degree, all the world over, and in all the ages. It is practically universal.