caste. There was no hereditary nobility in ancient
Mexico, nor were there any hereditary vocations, as "artisans,"
"merchants," etc. See Bandelier, _op. cit._ p. 599.]

[Footnote 129: See the copious references in Tylor's _Primitive
Culture_, ii. 340-371; Mackay, _Religious Development of the
Greeks and Hebrews_, ii. 406-434; Oort and Hooykaas, _The Bible
for Young People_, i. 30, 189-193; ii. 102, 220; iii. 21, 170,
316, 393, 395; iv. 85, 226. Ghillany, _Die Menschenopfer der
alten Hebraeer_, Nuremberg, 1842, treats the subject with much
learning.]

[Footnote 130: Spencer, _Princip. Sociol._, i. 287; Tylor, _op.
cit._ ii. 345.]

The custom of sacrificing captives to the gods was a marked advance upon
the practice in the lower period of barbarism, when the prisoner, unless
saved by adoption into the tribe of his captors, was put to death with
lingering torments. There were occasions on which the Aztecs tortured
their prisoners before sending them to the altar,[131] but in general
the prisoner was well-treated and highly fed,--fatted, in short, for the
final banquet in which the worshippers participated with their savage
deity.[132] In a more advanced stage of development than that which the
Aztecs had reached, in the stage when agriculture became extensive
enough to create a steady demand for servile labour, the practice of
enslaving prisoners became general; and as slaves became more and more
valuable, men gradually succeeded in compounding with their deities for
easier terms,--a ram, or a kid, or a bullock, instead of the human
victim.[133]

[Footnote 131: Mr. Prescott, to avoid shocking the reader with
details, refers him to the twenty-first canto of Dante's
Inferno, _Conquest of Mexico_, vol. i. p. 64.]

[Footnote 132: See below, vol. ii. p. 283.]

[Footnote 133: The victim, by the offer of which the wrath of
the god was appeased or his favour solicited, must always be
some valued possession of the sacrificer. Hence, e. g., among
the Hebrews "wild animals, as not being property, were
generally considered unfit for sacrifice." (Mackay, _op. cit._
ii. 398.) Among the Aztecs (Prescott, _loc. cit._) on certain
occasions of peculiar solemnity the clan offered some of its
own members, usually children. In the lac