686 GENERAL REMARKS 



of the practice of human sacrifice having persisted in this part 

 of the world into perfectly historical times, 'paullo supra hanc 

 memoriam,' as Julius phrases it, Bell. Gall. vi. 19, I have to say 

 that the bones found in the long barrows of England do not seem 

 to me to bear the interpretation which Dr. Thurnam has put upon 

 them. Two of the sets of bones from long barrows which Dr. 

 Thurnam has described as furnishing evidence which would * con- 

 vince the most incredulous,' those, to wit, from the Ebberston and 

 those from the Kodmarton long barrows, are now in the Oxford 

 University Museum, and I have compared them with a considerable 

 number of skulls about the ante mortem character of the lesions on 

 which, whether recovered from or not, there is no doubt whatever. 

 Amongst these latter skulls I may specify a number of dried and 

 prepared New Zealand * heads ' in the Oxford University Museum, 

 and the skulls numbered 2880 A, 2880 B, 2880 C, and 2902 A in 

 the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. By the kindness 

 of Professor Humphry I was allowed to examine Dr. Thurnam's 

 collection in the Anatomical Museum at Cambridge. 



The first point in which the fractured portions of skulls known 

 to have been fractured ante mortem contrast with several of those 

 described by Dr. Thurnam is their great inferiority in mere number. 

 The skull of a man whom we know to have been hewn down by 

 a metal sabre, or to have been killed, as the New Zealanders are 

 known to have been, by a stone axe, may have some two or three 



to Professor Max MuUer's article, Zeitschrift der morgenl. Gesellschaft, bd. ix. 1855, 

 does he specially mention the fact of the falsification of the Vedas. It is less excu- 

 sable that Grimm should have written of the practice of widow-burning, of which 

 both Strabo and Diodorus had spoken with reprobation, in the following terms, 

 p. 307: 



' Wie hat sich die oft gef uhllose Weichherzigkeit der neueren Luf t gemacht gegen 

 den herben Brauch des Mitverbrennens der Frauen im Alterthum, und doch billigen 

 wir, dass die Ehe, wenn sie ihres (Gesetz ausdriickenden) Namens werth sei, ewig und 

 unauflosbar heisze, und preisen als seltnes Gliick, dass hoch-bejahrte Ehleute auf den- 

 selben Tag hingerafft werden. Denn erhebend ist es wenn gesagt werden konnte 

 *Bis sex lustra tori nox mitis et ultima clausit, 



Arserunt uno funera bina rogo/ Martial, 10. 71. 



Further references may be found in the Antiquitates Danicse of Thomas Bartho- 

 linus, 1689, who says, p. 556, ' pleni sunt Historicorum libri, varias apud nationes, 

 uxores maritis superstites simul cum defunctis cremates, vel super corpora eorum 

 interfectas.' 



In a later work on Danish antiquities, Arnkiel's Cimbrischen Heyden- Religion, 

 1702, four chapters, xv-xviii. pp. 97-135, are devoted to the four subjects of the 

 burial of wives with their dead husbands, the burial of friends, the burial of captives, 

 and the burial of slaves in honour of great men deceased. 



Professor H. Schaaffhausen's article, 'Die Menschenfresserei und das Menschen- 

 opfer,' in the Archiv. fiir Anthropologie, iv. 1870, p. 245, is the most recent and one 

 of the most valuable memoirs upon this subject. 



