The Apache and Navajo branches of the Athapascan family are not unacquainted with the use of clay as a comestible, although among the former it is now scarcely ever used and among the latter used only as a condiment to relieve the bitterness of the taste of the wild potato; in the same manner it is known to both the Zuñi and Tusayan. Wallace says that eating dirt was "a very common and destructive habit among Indians and half-breeds in the houses of the whites."[472] "Los apassionados à comer tierra son los Indios Otomacos."[473] "The earth which is eaten by the Ottomacs [of the Rio Orinoco] is fat and unctuous."[474] Waitz[475] cites Heusinger as saying that the Ottomacs of the Rio Orinoco eat large quantities of a fatty clay. Clay was eaten by the Brazilians generally.[476] The Romans had a dish called "alica" or "frumenta," made of the grain zea mixed with chalk from the hills at Puteoli, near Naples.[477] According to the myths of the Cingalese, their Brahmins once "fed on it [earth] for the space of 60,000 years."[478] PREHISTORIC FOODS USED IN COVENANTS. It has been shown that the Apache, on several occasions, as when going out to meet strangers, entering into solemn agreements, etc., made use of the hoddentin. A similar use of food, generally prehistoric, can be noted in other regions of the world. It was a kind of superstitious trial used among the Saxons to purge themselves of any accusation by taking a piece of barley bread and eating it with solemn oaths and execrations that it might prove poisonous or their last morsel if what they asserted or denied was not true.[479] Those pieces of bread were first execrated by the priest, from which he infers that at a still earlier day sacramental bread may have been used for the same purpose. At Rome, in the time of Cicero and Horace, a master who suspected that his slaves had robbed him conducted them before a priest. They were each obliged to eat a cake over which the priest had "pronounced some magical words (_carmine infectum_)."[480] The people living on the coast of Coramandel have an ordeal consisting in the chewing of unboiled rice. No harm will attach to him who tells the truth, but the perjurer is threatened with condign punishment in this world and in that to come.[481] Bread is bitten when the Ostaaks of Siberia take a solemn oath, such as one of fealty to the Czar.[482] SACRED BREADS AND CAKES.