114 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
While the Vancouver Island group seems to extend more or less 
along the coast throughout the Cowitchin area, from beyond Sooke on 
the southwest to Comox on the east, that on the mainland is confined 
at present to a narrow strip on the banks of the Fraser extending from 
the village of Hatzic to Port Hammond.” Those opened and examined 
by myself are found in a cluster on a ranch at Hatzic, on the right bank 
of the river. These sepulchres, with their ancient mode of burial, belong 
to a comparatively distant past. The Indians now dwelling in the neigh- 
bourhood appear to know nothing of them ; disclaim all knowledge of the 
people who built them and are quite unconcerned at their being opened 
or disturbed. This indifference in the face of the zealous vigilance they 
exercise over their own old burial grounds or depositories of the dead is 
the more striking. The difficulty of procuring osteological data from 
any of the burial grounds of the modern tribes is well known to any who 
have attempted to do so, and this unusual indifference displayed towards 
these mounds by the Indians of the district would seem to suggest that 
they belong to some antecedent and forgotten tribes. Indeed, an aged 
Indian of the place informed the writer that his people called them 
“Ghost heaps”; that they were there when they first came into those 
parts; that no one knew who made them and that no Indian would 
approach them on any account. Indian traditions, one knows, are not 
very reliable data, but in this instance they support the evidence of the 
mounds themselves and may have a basis of truth in them. Whether 
they antedate the present tribes or not they were undoubtedly built 
when a mode of burial prevailed very different from that practised by 
their ancestors when the whites first came in contact with them ; and the 
osteological data they have yielded reveal a habit of cranial deformation 
of a kind very unlike that known to have been practised in this region. 
These tumuli are interesting, too, apart from the question of their 
antiquity as they seem to present to us, either a development from 
simple conceptions and ideas concerning the dead to more advanced and 
complex ones ; or else they mark in a most interesting manner the dif- 
ferent degrees of honour their builders were wont to pay to their dead. 
For they show a markedly graduated transition from simple interment 
of a body beneath a pile of clay to the construction of comparatively 
elaborate tombs, composed of a great number of boulders arranged in 
precise and geometrical order and covered with layers of different kinds 
of sand and clay. But I shall best describe them if I take them in what 
seems to me from the evidence their natural order, which I find may be 
with propriety arranged in a fivefold series. The simplest and first of 
the series, and, as I am led to believe the oldest, was formed by placing 
the dead body on the ground somewhat below the level of its surface and 

1 Since the above was written the writer has learned of the existence of another 
group farther south near the boundary line. 
