, = 
yarnrow.] URN-BURIAL. 137 
fruits of all, and performing sacrifices ; after that time they carry it out and place it 
somewhere near the city. 
Notre.—The Egyptian mummies could only be seen in front, the back being covered 
by a box or coffin ; the Ethiopian bodies could be seen all round, as the column of glass 
was transparent. 
With the to.egoing examples as illustration, the matter of embalm- 
ment may be for the present dismissed, with the advice to observers 
that particular care should be taken, in case mummies are discovered, 
to ascertain whether the bodies have been submitted to a regular pre- 
servative process, or owe their protection to ingredients in the soil of 
their graves or to desiccation in arid districts. 
URN-BURIAL. 
To close the subject of subterranean burial proper, the following ac- 
count of urn-burial in Foster * may be added: 
Urn-burial appears to have been practiced to some extent by the mound-builders, 
particularly in some of the Southern States. In the mounds on the Wateree River, 
near Camden, 8. C., according to Dr. Blanding, ranges of vases, one above the other, 
filled with human remains, were found. Sometimes when the mouth of the vase is 
small the skull is placed with the face downward in the opening, constituting 2 sort 
of cover. Entire cemeteries have been found in which urn-burial alone seems to have 
been practiced. Such a one was accidentally discovered not many years since in Saint 
Catherine’s Island, on the coast of Georgia. Professor Swallow informs me that from 
a mound at New Madrid, Mo., he obtained a human skull inclosed in an earthen jar, 
the lips of which were too small to admit of its extraction. It must therefore have 
been molded on the heail after death. 
A similar mode of burial was practiced by the Chaldeans, where the funeral jars 
often contain a human cranium much too expanded to admit of the possibility of its 
passing out of it, so that either the clay must have been modeled over the corpse, 
and then baked, or the neck of the jar must have been added subsequently to the 
other rites of interment.t 
It is with regret that the writer feels obliged to difter from the distin- 
guished author of the work quoted regarding urn-burial, for notwith- 
standing that it has been employed by some of the Central and Southern 
American tribes, it is not believed to have been customary, but fo a very 
limited extent, in North America, except as a secondary interment. He 
must admit that he himself has found bones in urns or ollas in the graves 
of New Mexico and California, but under circumstances that would 
seem to indicate a deposition long subsequent to death. In the graves 
of the ancient peoples of California a number of ollas were found in 
long-used burying places, and it is probable that as the bones were dug 
up time and again for new burials they were simply tossed into pots, 
which were convenient receptacles, or it may have been that bodies 
* Pre-historic Races, 1573, p. 199. 
t Rawlinson’s Herodotus, Book i, chap. 198, note. 
