148 MORTUARY CUSTOMS OF NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
landscapes and balmy climate of California and India incremation is as natural to the 
savage as it is for him to love the beauty of thesun. Let the vile Esquimaux and the 
frozen Siberian bury their dead if they will; it matters little, the earth is the same 
above as below; or to them the bosom of the earth may seem even the beiter; but in 
California do not blame thesavage if he recoils at the thought of going under ground! 
This soft pale halo of the lilac hills—ah, let him console himself if he will with the 
belief that his lost friend enjoys it still! The narrator concluded by saying that they 
destroyed full $500 worthof property. ‘‘The blankets,” said he with a fine Californian 
scorn of such absurd insensibility to a good bargain, ‘the blankets that the American 
offered him $16 for were not worth half the money.” 
After death the Se-nél hold that bad Indians return into coyotes. Others fall off 
a bridge which all souls must traverse, or are hooked off by a raging bull at the 
further end, while the good escape across. Like the Yokaia and the Konkan, they 
believe it necessary to nourish the spirits of the departed for the space of a year. 
This is generally done by a squaw, who takes pinole in her blanket, repairs to the 
scene of the incremation, or to places hallowed by the memory of the dead, where 
she scatters it over the ground, meantime rocking her body violently to and fro in a 
dance and chanting the following chorous : 
Hel-lel-li-ly, 
Hel-lel-lo, 
Hel-lel-lu. 
This refrain is repeated over and over indefinitely, but the words have no mean 
ing whatever. 
Henry Gillman* has published an interesting account of the explor- 
ation of a mound near Waldo, Fla., in which he found abundant evi- 
dence that cremation had existed among the former Indian population. 
It is as follows: 
In opening a burial-mound at Cade’s Pond, asmall body of water situated about two 
miles northeastward of Santa F6 Lake, Fla., the writer found two instances of crema- 
tion, in each of which the skull of the subject, which was unconsumed, was used as 
the depository of his ashes. The mound contained besides a large number of human 
burials, the bones being much decayed. With them were deposited a great number of 
vessels of pottery, many of which are painted in brilliant colors, chiefly red, yellow, 
and brown, and some of them ornamented with indented patterns, displaying not a 
little skill in the ceramic art, though they are reduced to fragments. The first of the 
skulls referred to was exhumed at a depth of 24 feet. It rested on its apex (base 
uppermost), and was filled with fragments of half incinerated human bones, mingled 
with dark-colored dust, and the sand which invariably sifts into crania under such 
circumstances. Immediately beneath the skull lay the greater part of a human tibia, 
presenting the peculiar compression known as a platyenemism to the degree of affording 
a latitudinal index of .512; while beneath and surrounding it lay the fragments of a 
large number of human bones, probably constituting an entire individual. In the 
second instance of this peculiar mode in cremation, the cranium was discovered on 
nearly the opposite side of the mound, at a depth of 2 feet, and, like the former, resting 
on its apex. It was filled witha black mass—the residuum of burnt human bones min- 
gled with sand. At three feet to the eastward lay the shaft of a flattened tibia, which 
presents the longitudinal index of .527. Both the skulls were free from all action of 
fire, and though subsequently crumbling to pieces on their removal, the writer had 
opportunity to observe their strong resemblance to the small, orthocephalie crania 
which he had exhumed from mounds in Michigan. The same resemblance was per- 
ceptible in the other cranium belonging to this mound. The small, narrow, retreating 
frontal, prominent parietal protuberances, rather protuberant occipital, which was 
*Amer. Naturalist, November, 1878. p. 753. 
