78 Mr. E. Lovett's Report on the 



all races, and in all times, not only to regard death as a great 

 and terrible mystery, but to treat the dead, at any rate their own 

 dead, with the reverence and care which would be the natural 

 result of the awe caused by that mystery. Therefore, we find 

 such lasting memorials and such displays of art and science 

 scattered over the world in connection with the dead of past ages, 

 many of which are the only existing records of the people they 

 represent, and from which alone we gather the scant information 

 we possess regarding them. 



Perhaps the earliest form of the disposal of the dead was by 

 burial, which word simply means " hiding," the body being laid 

 on the ground and covered over with stones, thus forming a sort 

 of cairn or mound. This of course became elaborated, and it is 

 probable that even in the age of stone this method developed 

 into the erection of cists or rude slab-constructed stone cham- 

 bers in the centre of its mound. From this cave-burials would 

 naturally spring, and as caves were often inhabited, the custom 

 of converting a man's house into his tomb, as practised by some 

 races, would soon follow. 



When we come to examine the customs of existing, or at any 

 rate recent, races or tribes, we find that scaffold burial, open and 

 covered, and from the latter house burial, to have been practised, 

 not only by the aboriginal Australians in a very primitive man- 

 ner, but by the Sioux, Chippawa, Blackfeet, Narajos, Cheyennes, 

 and Esquimaux Indians in a large variety of ways, including the 

 raised platform, tree-burial, raised boxes, lodges, and such-like 

 erections. 



The house naturally developed into the tomb, with its wide- 

 spread diversity and artistic grandeur. This form of burial may 

 almost be said to have reached its highest development in Etrus- 

 can and Egyptian times, the wonderful art of the former and the 

 gigantic erections of the latter surpassing anything else before or 

 since of their kind. 



The catacombs of the early Christians were a sort of reversion 

 to house or cave burials, whilst the method as at present adopted 

 places the body deep in the earth, and rears the tomb or monu- 

 ment above it. 



We will now revert briefly to mound burials, and these have 

 been as widely distributed as, or perhaps even more so than, any 

 other form of sepulture. North America is perhaps the country 

 in which we find the highest development of this form of burial, 

 and the gigantic mounds of the Mississippi Valley have yielded 

 an enormous amount of evidence as to the earlier races of that 

 continent. These mounds, which were so large that modern 

 villages have in some instances been built upon them, were often 

 erected in the rude outline of some animal form, and the in- 

 vestigation of them has proved conclusively that they were the 



