Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/429

Rh given, or, that socialism is no importation, but a home product, wherever found; to give good reasons for expecting that the new social order will be a "happy issue" to every one, and to justify the conviction that the situation must come to this new order within a comparatively short period, or to barbarism. The author has also a more serious purpose than the one of mere information, which is to prepare the public to take such an attitude as to make the revolution, which he foresees as a certainty, a bloodless and dangerless one, resulting in the establishment of a wholesome security.

blood-covenant is a rite by which two persons absorb each the other's blood, either by drinking or by transfusion to the vein?, whereby they become bound to one another in even a closer connection than that of brotherhood. It prevails in many countries—savage, barbarous, and semi-barbarous—and may be traced back to extreme antiquity. Dr. Trumbull discovers it first in Syria; then finds numerous accounts of it in the journals of African travelers and of adventurers among the North American Indians; detects it in the Norse lands of Europe and in India, and so around the world. lie might also have found it a characteristic custom among the Albanians and some of the south Slavs. Going back into history he finds it still more prevalent in the olden times, and, seeking to discover it in its origins, he detects it in the rites and literature of the ancient Egyptians, and allusions upon allusions to it in the books of the Bible. Besides description and history, the purpose of his book is to investigate the meaning and symbolism of the rite. He believes that its origin, to use one of the many statements he makes respecting it, is in "the universally dominating primitive convictions that the blood is the life; that the heart, as the blood-fountain, is the very Boul of every personality; that blood-transfer is soul-transfer; that blood sharing, human or divine-human, secures an inter-union of natures; and that a union of the human nature with the divine is the highest ultimate attainment reached out after by the most primitive as well as by the most enlightened mind of humanity." With savage and barbarous peoples the rite lies at the foundation of cannibalism; it is the motive of sacrifices, in which the animal is offered to the god as a substitute for the human blood. In one form the drops of blood were put in wine or other draughts and drunken: then the wine was drunken without the actual presence of the blood; whence we have the use of wine in pledges of friendship and in marriage. Among the Jews it is symbolized in circumcision; and, finally. It found its culmination in the offering of the blood of Christ, which Christians of all denominations again observe symbolically, after their Master's own institution, in the use of wine at the sacrament. These views, which Dr. Trumbull sets forth with much force and copious illustrations by references and quotations, arc not a theory which he set out to prove, but are thoughts that have grown upon him as he has advanced in his work, and have been suggested by his researches; and the fact that they have been hitherto overlooked furnishes, to his mind, another illustration of the "inevitably cramping influence of a preconceived fixed theory—to which all the ascertained facts must be conformed—in any attempt at thorough and impartial scientific investigation."

author of this work having acquired the method of curing disease which is practiced by the mind-curers, came to the conclusion that the success attending that method is due to concentration of thought, and not to the theology underlying the method. She regards it as a well-attested fact that disease, even inorganic, can be cured as well as caused by the mind or the imagination. Besides especially elaborating this theory she reviews "The Theology of the Christian Scientists"; discusses "The Single-Substance Theory," or Materialism, and the manifestations of "Mind in Animals and in the Lower Races of Men"; attempts to trace "The Origin of the Doctrine of the Immortal Soul"; and searches for "Bible Proofs of the Single-Substance Theory."