292 GENERAL REMARKS 



skeletons were disposed around such principal interment but in 

 such a way as to show that less care and trouble had been bestowed 

 upon them, much probability would have attached to the view 

 that these latter skeletons might have been those of captives or of 

 slaves slaughtered in honour of the chief represented by the central 

 interment. But I have shown in ' British Barrows,' pp. 530 and 

 535 \ that where a single undisturbed interment has been found 

 in company with, though distinguishable from, a number of bones 

 giving evidence of the presence with it of several other bodies, 

 these latter bones give evidence of their having been placed as 

 we find them with a certain pious painstaking which arranged 

 them, when parts, not of a body, but of a skeleton, without ana- 

 tomical knowledge, though obviously with a view to making room 

 for the skeleton found undisturbed. What we have to deal with 

 in such cases as those described above I.e. are cases of successive 

 interments ; and if we figure to ourselves how the mingled and 

 allied feelings of reverence and of terror would act upon the otherwise 

 excitable nature of uncivilised men engaged in such a work, we 

 shall have little difficulty in interpreting the phenomena presented 

 to us by the bony remains without having recourse to the hypo- 

 thesis of human sacrifices, a hypothesis incompatible at once with 

 the care bestowed upon some and the injuries received by others of 

 these remains. The question however here naturally arises, how is 

 it that in the very large number of interments recorded in ' British 

 Barrows' we have never come upon any bony remains bearing their 

 evidence to the existence of a practice which is spoken of by such 

 a very large number of literary witnesses? In answer to this 

 I have to say that the literary evidence when duly considered 

 proves simply that slaves and captives were slaughtered at the 

 funeral of their lords without proving that they were allowed to 

 lie beside them afterwards. The only passage I have met with 

 which might be held to speak of a contiguity in the graves as 

 well as a contemporaneity in the deaths of the masters and of the 

 slaves is the passage in which Caesar writes, as follows, of the 

 funeral ceremonies of the Gauls, B. G. vi. 19: ' Funera sunt pro 

 cultu Gallorum magnifica et sumptuosa ; omniaque quae vivis cordi 

 fuisse arbitrantur in ignem inferunt, etiam animalia, ac, paullo 

 supra hanc memoriam, servi et clientes, quos ab iis dilectos esse con- 

 1 [See also the description of the Swell barrows in Article XVIII. Editor.] 



