Manchester Memoirs, Vol. xlvi. (1902), No. \%. 25 



employed. For instance, on the banks of the Orinoco, 

 there is a tribe which ties the bodies of the dead to the 

 roots of trees and lets them drift on the river till the fish 

 have cleaned the bones. Then they take the bones out 

 and keep them in their huts. In Hyrcania a breed of 

 dogs was kept at the public expense to serve as sepulchres.* 

 But whether animals, earth, fire, air, water, or embalming 

 were the agency employed, the object seems to have been 

 to prevent putrefaction or to remove its consequences. 



Cremation has been held to imply a different theory 

 of future life from that implied in burial. In the case of 

 burial, it is said, the soul remains in the tomb. Offerings 

 of food are brought to the tomb, and sometimes a means 

 of communication was left from the outside to the inside of 

 the grave for the passage of food.f To get hold of the 

 remains of a famous hero is to secure the help of his 

 spirit. The Spartans got hold of the bones of Orestes, 

 the Athenians of the bones of Theseus. In West Africa 

 great efforts are made to secure the skulls of famous chiefs, 

 and it is necessary to conceal their graves with care for 

 fear the enemy should carry them off. 



Cremation, on the other hand, is held to imply that the 

 spirits of the dead go away to another world and return 

 no more.:|: As in sacrifice fire conveys the material object 

 to the gods, so fire translates the soul from the material 

 to the immaterial world. Or else it is that, as fire 

 etherialises the sacrifice, so, by burning, the body is 

 etherialised and enabled to join the soul. Certainly, no gift 

 could go with the soul of the cremated person unless it 

 also was burnt. The wife of the tyrant of Corinth came 

 back to complain that her clothes had not been burnt 



* Ridgway, The Early Age of Greece^ p. 487. 



t Ridgway, op. ciL, p. 510. 



X Horn., //., xxiii., 69 . . Od., xi., 51 



