At Ta’Annek[216] after the discoveries at Gezer, a cemetery containing some twenty infants, also buried in jars, was discovered about a rock altar, the age of the infants that had been sacrificed having been as much as five years. At Megiddo[217] underneath a corner of a temple, there were found four jars with the bones of children and near them smaller jars and a bowl, which undoubtedly contained the food that children were supposed to need in the other world. Professor Sellin suggests that the bones found at Tell Ta’Annek may have been the bones of children that had died too young to be buried in the family sepulchres, but the burden of evidence suggests a different explanation. Here, then, we have a double reason for the sacrifice of the children, for the foundation sacrifices were—one might almost say _are_, so recently have there been instances of the practice—of a different order from the sacrifice of the first-born. On these foundation sacrifices, Dr. Driver has made some interesting notes. We are all familiar with our own foundation ceremonies, which are really nothing more or less than a modification of these primitive ceremonies that consisted almost entirely of the sacrifice of a human being and in many instances of an infant, inasmuch as the infant, having just come into the world, was purer and nearer to god and therefore more acceptable. Traces of the custom of sacrificing a human life in order that some destructive god or demon might be propitiated and the lives of those about to occupy the building thereby made safer are found in India, New Zealand, China, Japan, Mexico, Germany, and Denmark. The extent of these foundation sacrifices had been revealed by Dr. Trumbull in his _Threshold Covenant_, all going to show that different branches of the human family, though far removed, mounted much the same steps in their endeavour to achieve the truth about the world in which they lived. Among the Danes, when the fortifications were first being built around Copenhagen many years ago, the walls, as they were built, kept sinking in, and it did not seem possible that they would ever stand firmly. “The workmen finally took a little girl, placed her at a table, and gave her play toys and sweetmeats. Then, as she sat there enjoying herself, the masons built an arch over her and in this way the walls were made solid.”[218] A similar story is told[219] of a castle of Liebenstein. It was made fast and impregnable by buying a child from its mother and walling it in. Slavensk, a Slavonic town on the Danube, had been devastated by the plague and when it was built anew the wise men of the town agreed that there must be a human victim. Messengers were sent out before sunrise to seize the first living creature they met. The victim was a child and it was buried alive under the foundation stone of the citadel, and from that time on, a citadel was called a Dyetinet, from Dyetina[220], a child.