appease the angry god, two hundred children of the noblest families were picked out for sacrifice, and the tale of victims was swelled by not less than three hundred more who volunteered to die for the fatherland. They were sacrificed by being placed, one by one, on the sloping hands of the brazen image, from which they rolled into a pit of fire.(801) If an aristocracy thus adopted the practice of sacrificing other people’s children instead of their own, kings may very well have followed or set the example. A final mitigation of the custom would be the substitution of condemned criminals for innocent victims. Such a substitution is known to have taken place in the human sacrifices annually offered in Rhodes to Baal.(802) The custom of sacrificing children, especially the first born, is not peculiarly Semitic. In some tribes of New South Wales the first-born child of every woman was eaten by the tribe as part of a religious ceremony.(803) The Indians of Florida sacrificed their first-born male children.(804) Amongst the people of Senjero in Eastern Africa we are told that many families “must offer up their first-born sons as sacrifices, because once upon a time, when summer and winter were jumbled together in a bad season, and the fruits of the earth would not ripen, the soothsayers enjoined it. At that time a great pillar of iron is said to have stood at the entrance of the capital, which by the advice of the soothsayers was broken down by order of the king, upon which the seasons became regular again. To avert the recurrence of such a confusion of the seasons, the soothsayers are reported to have enjoined the king to pour human blood once a year on the base of the broken shaft of the pillar, and also upon the throne. Since then certain families are obliged to deliver up their first-born sons, who are sacrificed at an appointed time.”(805) The heathen Russians often sacrificed their first-born to the god Perun.(806) The condemnation and pretended death by fire of the mock king in Egypt is probably a reminiscence of a real custom of burning him. Evidence of a practice of burning divine personages will be forthcoming later on. In Bilaspur the expulsion of the Brahman who had occupied the king’s throne for a year is perhaps a substitute for putting him to death.