supposed to be a portion of the Brehon code, and traceable to the
time of St. Patrick, speaks of land in a poetically symbolic, but
actually realistic manner, and says, "Land is perpetual man." All
the ingredients of our physical frame come from the soil. The food
we require and enjoy, the clothing which enwraps us, the fire which
warms us, all save the vital spark that constitutes life, is of the
land, hence it is "perpetual man." Selden ("Titles of Honor," p.
27), when treating of the title "King of Kings," refers to the
eastern custom of homage, which consisted not in offering the
person, but the elements which composed the person, EARTH and
WATER--"the perpetual man" of the Brehons--to the conqueror. He
says:

"So that both titles, those of King of Kings and Great King, were
common to those emperors of the two first empires; as also (if we
believe the story of Judith) that ceremonies of receiving an
acknowledgment of regal supremacy (which, by the way, I note here,
because it was as homage received by kings in that time from such
princes or people as should acknowledge themselves under their
subjection) by acceptance upon their demand of EARTH and WATER.
This demand is often spoken of as used by the Persian, and a
special example of it is in Darius' letters to Induthyr, King of
the Scythians, when he first invites him to the field; but if he
would not, then bringing to your sovereign as gifts earth and
water, come to a parley. And one of Xerxes' ambassadors that came
to demand earth and water from the state of Lacedaemon, to satisfy
him, was thrust into a well and earth cast upon him."

The earlier races seem to me, either by reasoning or by instinct,
to have arrived at the conclusion that every man was, in right of