OGBURY BARROWS 301 



in such a state, is supposed to possess a soul of its own ; 

 and the fire is the chosen mode for setting the soul free 

 from all clogging earthly impurities. So till yesterday, in 

 the rite of suttee, the Hindoo widow immolated herself upon 

 her husband's pyre, in order that her spirit might follow 

 him unhampered to the world of ghosts whither he was 

 bound. Thus the twin barrows on Ogbury hillside bridge 

 over for us two vast epochs of human culture, both now so 

 remote as to merge together mentally to the casual eyes of 

 modern observers, but yet in reality marking in their very 

 shape and disposition an immense, long, and slow advance 

 of human reason. For just as the long barrow answers in 

 form to the buried human corpse and the chambered hut 

 that surrounds and encloses it, so does the round barrow 

 answer in form to the urn containing the calcined ashes of 

 the cremated barbarian. And is it not a suggestive fact 

 that when we turn to the little graveyard by the church 

 below we find the Christian belief in the resurrection of the 

 body, as opposed to the pagan belief in the immortality of 

 the soul, once more bringing us back to the small oblong 

 mound which is after all but the dwarfed and humbler 

 modern representative of the long barrow ? So deep is 

 the connection between that familiar shape and the practice 

 of inhumation that the dwarf long barrow seems everywhere 

 to have come into use again throughout all Europe, after 

 whole centuries of continued cremation, as the natural con- 

 comitant and necessary mark of Christian burial. 



This is what I would have said, if I had been asked, at 

 Ogbury Barrows. But I wasn't asked ; so I devoted myself 

 instead to psychological research, and said nothing. 



