(Fiji, Samoa), Melanesia (Florida
Islands), Borneo (formerly),[1858] and North America (the Iroquois, the
Natchez, the Florida peninsula, and the Southwest coast).[1859] Nowhere
does it appear on so large a scale as in Mexico; and it existed also in
Peru.[1860] In Africa it was practiced to a frightful extent in
Ashantiland and Dahomiland and more guardedly in Yoruba.[1861]

+1031+. Its gradual disappearance (a result of increasing refinement of
feeling) was marked by the substitution of other things for human
victims or of aliens for tribesmen. In early times indeed it seems to
have been slaves and captives taken in war that were commonly
sacrificed. In more civilized times the blood of a tribesman, as more
precious than other blood, was regarded as being more acceptable to the
deity, and it was then a sign of advance when aliens were substituted
for tribesmen. Lower animals were sacrificed in place of men: in India,
where the recently sown fields had been fertilized with human blood, it
became the practice to kill a chicken instead of a human being; and so
in the story of Abraham (Gen. xxii) a ram is substituted for the human
being.[1862] Elsewhere paste images are offered to the deity as
representing men; an interesting development is found in Yoruba, where
the proposed victim, instead of being sacrificed, becomes the protector
of the sacrificer; that is, he is regarded as substantially divine, as
he would have been had he been sacrificed.[1863]

+1032+. Along with gifts, which formed perhaps the earliest method of
conciliating divine beings, we find in very early times a number of
procedures in honor of the deity, and intended in a general way to
procure divine favor. Among these procedures dances and processions are
prominent. The dance, as is observed above,[1864] is simply the
transference to religious rites of a common social act. It is, however,
often supposed to have been communicated supernaturally, and in some
cases it attains a high religious significance by its association with
stories of divine persons. This organized symbolic dance has been
developed to the greatest extent among certain North American Indian
tribes.[1865] Here every actor and every act represents a personage or
procedure in a myth, and thus the dance embodies religious conceptions.
This sort of symbolism has been adopted also in some sections of the
Christian church, where it is no doubt effective in many cases as an
element of externa