out their hearts through large gaping wounds, as a man might pluck ripe fruit.”[26] The demonolatry of the sixth century before Christ is the same as that of fourteen hundred years after the birth of Our Lord. As has been previously noticed, Balaam employed bullocks and rams for _extispicium_, and nine centuries later, in the book of Ezechiel (xxi. 21), Esarhaddon is represented as looking at the liver of an animal offered in sacrifice with a view to divination. “For the king of Babylon stood in the highway, at the head of two ways, seeking divination, shuffling arrows: he inquired of the idols, and consulted entrails. On his right hand was the divination of Jerusalem, to set battering rams, to open the mouth in slaughter.” The mode of sortilege by arrows, belomancy, to which allusion is here made was extensively practised among the Chaldeans, as also by the Arabs. Upon this passage S. Jerome comments: “He shall stand in the highway, and consult the oracle after the manner of his nation, that he may cast arrows into a quiver, and mix them together, being written upon or marked with the names of each people, that he may see whose arrow will come forth, and which city he ought first to attack.” Among the three hundred and sixty idols which stood round about the Caaba of Mecca, and which were all destroyed by Mohammed when he captured the city in the eighth year of the Hejira, was the statue of a man, made of agate, who held in one hand seven arrows such as the pagan Arabs used in divination. This figure, which, it is said, anciently represented the patriarch Abraham, was regarded with especial awe and veneration. The arrows employed by the early Arabs for magical practices were more generally only three in number. They were carefully preserved in the temple of some idol, before whose shrine they had been consecrated. Upon one of them was inscribed “My Lord hath commanded me”; upon another “My Lord hath forbidden me”; and the third was blank. If the first was drawn the inquirer looked upon it as a propitious omen promising success in the enterprise; if the second were drawn he augured failure; if the third, all three were mixed again and another trial was made. These divining arrows seem always to have been consulted by the Arabs before they engaged in any important undertaking, as, for example, when a man was about to go upon a particular journey, to marry, to commence some weighty business. In certain cases and in many countries rods were used instead of arrows. Small sticks were marked with occult signs, thrown into a vessel and drawn out; or, it might be, cast into the air, the direction they took and the position in which they fell being carefully noted. This practice is known as rhabdomancy. The LXX, indeed, Ezechiel xxi. 21, has ῥαβδομαντεία not βελομαντεία, and rhabdomancy is mentioned by S. Cyril of Alexandria.