Milk is sometimes accepted by the Arabs as a substitute for salt, as the essential factor in the covenant of salt (the _milha_).[92] Milk is nature's life food, it stands for liquid life; two "milk brothers" are somewhat as blood brothers, brothers by a common life.[93] "There seem to be indications," says W. Robertson Smith,[94] "that many primitive peoples regard milk as a kind of equivalent for blood as containing a sacred life. Thus to eat a kid seethed in its mother's milk might be taken as an equivalent to eating 'with the blood,' and be forbidden to the Hebrews[95] along with the bloody sacraments of the heathen." [92] See references, in W. Robertson Smith's _Religion of the Semites_ (p. 252, note), to Burckhardt and to _K[=a]mil_. [93] _Blood Covenant_, pp. 10, 11. [94] _Relig. of the Sem._, p. 204, note; also _Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia_, pp. 149, 150. [95] Exod. 23 : 19; 34 : 26; Deut. 14 : 21. Milk has been employed instead of blood, and again of salt, for transfusion in case of declining life from hemorrhage.[96] This would seem to justify the belief that milk and blood alike represent life in popular thought. [96] Quain's _Dict. of Medicine_, art. "Transfusion of Milk." A favorite experiment among young folks is to bring life to dead flies by covering them with salt. When flies are drowned purposely, or by accident, if one is taken from the water apparently dead, and laid on the table, or on a plate, and covered with common salt, in a few seconds the fly will creep out from under the salt, and soon fly away as if unharmed. Other flies in the same condition, not treated with salt, remain as dead. This has been tried by succeeding generations of young folks, and it is one of the folk-lore facts in support of the idea that salt is life. It may, of course, be that the absorbent power of salt clears the trachea of the fly, and thus permits the restoration of the natural breathing. Of course, there is some explanation of the phenomenon; but the fact remains that the common mind has been affected by such things in the direction of the belief that salt is life in a peculiar sense. After the foregoing pages were already in type, it was cabled as news from London that an English mechanic claimed to have discovered a method of resuscitating persons who have been drowned. He proposed to cover the entire body of the person taken from the water with dry salt, which is supposed to absorb the moisture, and thus draw the water from the lungs and permit the air again to circulate freely. He claimed to have revived a recently drowned cat, after letting it remain under salt for thirty minutes; and that a drowned dog was thus restored in two hours.