It is only here and there, however, that the scapegoat retains to historical times his first early form as a human victim. Much more often, in civilised lands at least, we get the usual successive mitigations of the custom. Sometimes, as we have seen already in these cases, the victim is not actually killed, but merely expelled, or even only playfully and ceremonially driven out of the city. In other instances, {354}we get the familiar substitution of the condemned criminal, or the imbecile, as in the Attic Thargelia.’ The Greeks of Asia Minor used actually to burn their atonement-victim, and cast his ashes into the sea; but the Leucadians merely threw down a condemned prisoner from a cliff, and lightened his fall by fastening live birds to him, while they kept boats below to save him from drowning, and carry him well beyond the frontier. In the vast majority of cases, however, we have the still more common substitution of a sacred animal for a human victim; and this appears to be in large part the origin of that common religious feature, the piacular sacrifice. Occasionally we get historical or half-historical evidence of the transition from a human victim to a divine or quasidivine animal. Thus, the people of Nias offer either a red horse or a buffalo to purify the land; but formerly, a man was bound to the same stake with the buffalo, and when the buffalo was killed, the man was driven away, no native daring to receive him or feed him. The sacrificial camel of the ancient Arabs, presumably piacular, is expressly stated to be a substitute for a human victim. The favourite victims of the Saracens were young and beautiful captives: but if such were not to be procured, they contented themselves with a white and faultless camel. The step hence to the habitual immolation or driving forth of a divine animal in place of a divine or quasi-divine man is a very small one. In Malabar, the cow is a sacred beast, and to kill or eat a cow is a crime like murder. Nevertheless, the Brahmans transfer the sins of the people to a cow or cows, which are then driven out wherever the Brahmans appoint. The ancient Egyptians used to sacrifice a bull, and lay upon its head all the evils which might otherwise happen to themselves and their country; then they sold the bull’s head to the Greeks, or flung it into the river. (Contrast this effort to get rid of the accursed head with the careful preservation and worship of the sacred one.) The best-known case of all, of course, is the Hebrew scapegoat, which was {355}the sacred animal of a shepherd people, turned out to die of hunger or thirst in the desert, and bearing on its head the sins of the people. (Contrast the scapegoat with the paschal lamb, and compare with the goats and sheep of the last judgment.) When cholera rages among the aboriginal tribes of India, they take a goat or a buffalo--in either case a female, the most sacred sex in Indian sacrifice, and black all over, like Apis