Dr. D.G. Brinton writes in the same strain (409. 238): "Out of the earth rises life, to it it returns. She it is who guards all germs, nourishes all beings. The Aztecs painted her as a woman with countless breasts; the Peruvians called her '_Mama_ Allpa,' _mother_ Earth; in the Algonkin tongue, the words for earth, mother, father, are from the same root. _Homo, Adam, chamaigenes_, what do all these words mean but earth-born, the son of the soil, repeated in the poetic language of Attica in _anthropos_, he who springs up like a flower?"
Mr. W. J. McGee, treating of "Earth the Home of Man," says (502. 28):--
"In like manner, mankind, offspring of Mother Earth, cradled and nursed through helpless infancy by things earthly, has been brought well towards maturity; and, like the individual man, he is repaying the debt unconsciously assumed at the birth of his kind, by transforming the face of nature, by making all things better than they were before, by aiding the good and destroying the bad among animals and plants, and by protecting the aging earth from the ravages of time and failing strength, even as the child protects his fleshly mother. Such are the relations of earth and man."
The Roman babe had no right to live until the father lifted him up from "mother-earth" upon which he lay; at the baptism of the ancient Mexican child, the mother spoke thus: "Thou Sun, Father of all that live, and thou Earth, our Mother, take ye this child and guard it as your son" (529. 97); and among the Gypsies of northern Hungary, at a baptism, the oldest woman present takes the child out, and, digging a circular trench around the little one, whom she has placed upon the earth, utters the following words: "Like this Earth, be thou strong and great, may thy heart be free from care, be merry as a bird" (392 (1891). 20). All of these practices have their analogues in other parts of the globe.
In another way, infanticide is connected with "mother-earth." In the book of the "Wisdom of Solomon" (xiv. 23) we read: "They slew their children in sacrifices." Infanticide--"murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange, and unnatural"--has been sheltered beneath the cloak of religion. The story is one of the darkest pages in the history of man. A priestly legend of the Khonds of India attributes to child-sacrifice a divine origin:--
