Note 5 — Chapter III · THE RELIGION OF THE IROQUOIS.

Human sacrifices were offered annually among the Aztecs, but never among the Iroquois. But even these were not entirely the result of Indian barbarity. “Human sacrifices have been practised by many nations, not excepting the most polished nations of antiquity.” “They were of frequent occurrence among the Greeks, as every school-boy knows, and in Egypt. In Rome they were so common as to require to be interdicted by an express law, less than a hundred years before the Christian Era,—a law recorded in a very honest strain of exultation by Pliny, notwithstanding which, traces of the existence of the practice may be discerned to a much later period.”5