“Very striking is the smiting of the blood, as sign of the covenant relation, upon the posts of the doorway; and in particular the mark of the red hand. The connection you endeavor to show between all this and the marriage rite is, to say the least of it, suggestive. The mystery of the gift and transmission of life, it has always seemed to me, early struck man; and that it did not have its issue only in perverted forms, is clear from the fragmentary glimpses we get into the Eleusinian mysteries, celebrated in honor of divinities of productivity. Purification from sin and blessedness in the next world appear to have been among the hopes of the initiated. “May I call your attention to one or two points? The Greek word for altar, βωμός (_bomos_), altar, from root βα (_ba_), seen in βαίνειν (_bainein_), ‘to step.’ “May not the whipping of the boys mentioned on page 175 be a misinterpreted substitute for sacrifices at the boundary posts, perhaps even at one time human sacrifices? Such later modifications of sacrifice into symbolic whippings are not unheard of elsewhere.” Professor Lamberton’s suggestion that the Greek word for altar has its origin in a “step” has confirmation in the fact, already noted, that the earliest temples were a shrine at the summit of a series of steps, as in a step-pyramid, in Babylonia, Egypt, Canaan, Mexico, Peru, and the South Sea Islands.[720] Is there not a reference to this ordinary mode of building an altar among the outside nations, in the divine command to Israel in the wilderness as to the building of an altar to Jehovah? “Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon.”[721] ----- Footnote 720: See p. 111 f., _supra_. Footnote 721: Exod. 20 : 26. ----- FROM PROFESSOR DR. DANIEL G. BRINTON. In the realm of American antiquities, and of anthropology generally, Dr. Brinton, Professor of American Archæology and Linguistics in the University of Pennsylvania, stands foremost. He has been President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and his knowledge and his work have had marked recognition in the International Oriental Congresses, in the American Philosophical Society, in the Academy of Natural Sciences, and in other learned bodies. He writes: “I have gone over, with constantly increasing interest, your pages on ‘The Threshold Covenant,’ an interest associated with admiration of the wide reading you have brought to bear on the theme, and the temperate and enlightened spirit in which you have presented the facts. “You have, without question, established the practical universality of the rites and ceremonies you describe, and the ideas from which they took their origin. Your volume is another and powerful witness to the parallelisms of culture, and to the unity in the forms of expression of the human mind.