THE INSTINCT OP IMMORTALITY. 233 



To all of these they pay some kind of adoration. 

 They doubt not but they shall exist in some future 

 state; they however fancy that their employments 

 there will be similar to those they are engaged in here, 

 without the labour and difficulty attached to them in 

 this period of their existence." 



I give this extract more especially because it is the 

 fashion at present with a certain school of archaeolo- 

 gists to eliminate from the American religions the 

 ideas of a Supreme Being, of good and evil, and 

 even of immortality. Cartier and Carver, and a host 

 of other unexceptionable evidences, could be quoted 

 against this stupid sacrifice of facts to a prevalent 

 but transient theory. 



Among rude peoples the belief in immortality ex- 

 hibits itself chiefly in their treatment of the bodies 

 of the dead, and in the rites connected with burial, 

 and it is information of this kind alone that we can 

 have regarding pre-historic men ; thus funeral rites 

 must occupy a prominent place in this chapter. We 

 must expect to find many of them crude and childish 

 in the extreme ; but we need not wonder at this when 

 we think for a moment of the mixture of forms, hea- 

 then, mediaeval, and scriptural, and the strange com- 

 pound of grief, hope, and pageantry which attend 

 burial among ourselves, with all our greater know- 

 ledge and more rational belief of immortality. 



The Americans universally held the posthumous life 

 and separate existence of the soul. When questioned 

 as to the nature and properties of the disembodied 



