Very closely bound up with the artificial gods of cultivation are the terminal gods with whom I dealt in the last chapter; so closely that it is sometimes impossible to separate them. We have already seen some instances of this connexion; the procession of the sacred victim usually ends with a perlustration of the boundaries. This perlustration is often preceded by the head of the thean-thropic victim. Such a ceremony extends all over India; in France and other European countries it survives in the shape of the rite known as Blessing the Fields, where the priest plays the same part as is played among the Nilgiri hillsmen by the low-caste Kurrumbar. In this rite, the Host is carried round the bounds of the parish, as the head of the sacred buffalo is carried round at the Indian festival. In some cases every field is separately visited. I was told as a boy in Normandy that a portion of the Host (stolen or concealed, I imagine) was sometimes buried in each field, but of this curious detail I can now obtain no confirmatory evidence, and I do not insist upon it. _We must remember, however, that the Host is the body of Christ, and that its presence in such cases is the exact analogue of the carrying round the pieces of the Meriah_. In {293}England, the ceremony merges into that of Beating the Bounds, already described; though I believe the significance of the boy-victims, and the necessity for whipping them as a rain-charm, will now be more apparent than when we last met with it. In many cases, all the world over, various animals come to replace the human victim-god. Thus we learn from Festus that the Romans sacrificed red-haired puppies in spring, in the belief that the crops would thus grow ripe and ruddy; and there can be little doubt that these puppies, like the lamb sacrifice at Holne and King’s Teignton, were a substitute for an original human victim. Even so, the Egyptians, as we shall see, sacrificed red-haired men as the representatives of Osiris, envisaged as a corn-god. In some cases, indeed, we have historical evidence of the human god being replaced at recent dates by a divine animal-victim; for example, in Chinna Kimedy, after the British had suppressed human sacrifices, a goat took the place of the sacred Meriah.