UBN-BUBIAL. 45 



made of birds' claws inserted into one another, and several specimens of 



little bags, and a cap plaited out of sea-grass and almost water-tight." 



With the foregoing examples as illustration, the matter of embalmment 



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 preservative process, or owe 



their protection to ingredients in the soil of their graves or to desiccation 



in arid districts. 



UBN-BUBIAL. 



To close the subject of subterranean burial proper, the following 

 account 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, S. C , according to Dr Blanding, ranges 

 of vases, one above the other, filled with human remains, were found. Some- 

 times when the mouth of the vase is small the skull is placed with the face 

 downward in the opening, constituting a 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 extrac- 

 tion. It must therefore have been molded on the head 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."f 



It is with regret that the writer feels obliged to differ from the distin- 

 guished author of the work quoted regarding urn-burial, for notwithstand- 

 ing that it has been employed by some of the Central and Southern 

 American tribes, it is not believed to have been customary, but to a very 



*Pre-Hitrtoiic Races, 1873, p. 191). 



t Rawliiison's Herodotus, Book 1, chap. 198, no'e. 



