has been taken up at both ends by such different persons, at such remote periods of time. The savage philosophy of America seems to have comprehended in it the relation, which we have already noticed, between the animal system and the frame of nature. Acosta, in his History of the Indies, reports, that in the human sacrifices of the Mexicans, the high priest pulled out the heart with his hands, which he showed smoking to the sun, to whom he offered this heat and fume of the heart, and presently he turned towards the idol, and cast the heart at his face. A very highly esteemed correspondent in Ceylon writes, There is a cast of people inhabiting this island who live wild in the woods, and worship fire as an emblem of purity; they are called Vandals, and several English officers have met a premature death by intruding near the holy fire, which is under a tamarind tree. With the Persians fire was an object of worship from the earliest times, under the name of _Amanus_, and _Mithas_; and it is retained as such at this day by the Geberrs, Gaurs, Guebres, or Ghebers, a sect of Indian philosophers. Pottinger says, “At the city of Yezd, in Persia, which is distinguished by the appellation of the Darûb Abadut, or seat of Religion, the Guebres are permitted to have an Atush Kudu, or Fire Temple (which, they assert, has had the sacred fire in it since the days of Zoroaster), in their own compartment of the city; but for this indulgence they are indebted to the avarice, not the tolerance of the Persian government, which taxes them at twenty-five rupees each man.” Hanway informs us, that the Ghebers suppose the throne of the Almighty is seated in the sun, and hence their worship of that luminary. “As to fire,” says Grose, “the Ghebers place the spring-head of it in that globe of fire, the sun, by them called Mithras, or Mihir, to which they pay the highest reverence, in gratitude for the manifold benefits flowing from his ministerial omniscience. But they are so far from confounding the subordination of the servant with the majesty of the Creator, that they not only attribute no sort of sense or reasoning to the sun or fire, in any of its operations, but consider it as a purely passive blind instrument, directed and governed by the immediate impression on it of the will of God; but they do not even give that luminary, all glorious as it is, more than the second rank among his works, reserving the first for the stupendous production of the Divine power, the mind of man.” The temples are generally built over subterraneous fires. Rabbi Benjamin observes, “Early in the morning, they (the Parsees or Ghebers of Ouham) go in crowds to pay their devotions to the sun, to whom upon all the altars are spheres consecrated, made by magic, resembling the circles of the sun; and, when the sun rises, these orbs seem to be inflamed, and turn round with a great noise. Every one has a censer in his hands, and offers incense to the sun.”