74 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



discovered scattered and separate; in other instances vast numbers 

 are grouped together, thus forming extensive cemeteries. ... As 

 to the form of the graves, they are rude fabrics, composed of rough 

 fîat stones." Mr. Bushnell quotes descriptions of many varieties. 

 "No other form of burial is more widely dispersed in eastern United 

 States . . . and stone-lined graves have been encountered up the 

 Valley of the Ohio into Pennsylvania, western Maryland, and Virginia, 

 and farther south they have been traced along the Tennessee from 

 its mouth to the mountains, and a few scattered examples have been 

 discovered in Northern Georgia Naturally the kind of stone with 

 which they were lined differed in widely separated localities." 



It is remarkable how widespread were customs of stone-lining 

 throughout the prehistoric world. In Thomas Wright's "The Celt, 

 the Roman, and the Saxon," London, 1885, which describes many 

 kinds of prehistoric and early graves, certain stone-lined ones are pic- 

 tured which resemble those of Westmount and the Southern Algonkins. 

 Sometimes, in the later forms, Roman roof tiles were used to replace 

 stones; and it is curious to note that the Southern Algonkins used 

 pieces of broken pottery in the same way. And in South Africa, the 

 method of burial of the prehistoric race called "The Cliff Dwellers of 

 T'zitzikama," who inhabited caves and rock shelters along the greater 

 portion of the sea-coast of South Africa, — having displaced the bands 

 of manlike Chacma baboons from these shelters ,^ — ^was similar in 

 principle. It is thus described by the discoverer, Mr. F. W. Fitz- 

 simons, F.Z.S., Curator of the Port Elizabeth Museum, in the Illus- 

 trated London News of December, 1921 : 



"When a cliff dweller died, a shallow hole was scraped i,n the 

 debris. . . . The body was doubled up in as small a space as possible, 

 with the knees drawn to the chest. It was then laid in the hole, on 

 its side; a flat slab of stone was placed on the head and another on the 

 body. Sometimes there was a third on the pelvis. . . . The deeper 

 we dug, the more fragile were the remains, and eventually, at depths 

 of from ten to twenty feet, we discovered the burial stones only, the 

 bones having long since returned to dust." 



One of the reflections from this extreme dispersion of the custom 

 is, of course, the amazing antiquity and persistence of primitive 

 customs. Another is the special enquiry concerning the relationship 

 and advent of this Westmount race. It should be noted that: the 

 site was solely one of burial; it contained skeletons of women, and a 

 lame man, showing they were not a mere war camp; they were in 

 good preservation in a dry soil on a slope; it was on an excellent 

 hillside site for a village, sheltered and with a wonderful outlook and 



