RUDE STONE MONUMENTS OF CORNWALL. 203 



remember that whether among savage or cultured people, death 

 is the most solemn fact in human history. Eespect to the 

 remains of the dead is the very keynote of such great historical 

 cults as those in Egypt and Greece and Rome — faiths, moreover, 

 which held untiring sv^ay in all the phases of social life. On 

 the due performance of the funeral rites the future of the 

 deceased was held mainly to depend. And whatever else 

 Chinstianity rejected of Pagan custom, that idea was so 

 thoroughly absorbed that its influence is patent yet. So strong, 

 moreover, was the continuance of the outward feeling of respect, 

 that the violation of sepulchres was one of the chief grounds of 

 divorce accepted among the Christians of the Roman empire. 

 Nor can we doubt that such sentiments and practices were 

 themselves survivals from far earlier days. Nor should we 

 question that among the races with whom they originated, or by 

 whom they were handed down, were the simple neolithic folk who, 

 spreading from the East along either shore of the Mediterranean 

 — as their remnant works still testify — found their way, at length, 

 to these western isles, long before the advent of Kelt or of 

 Saxon, and left behind them these memorials, which have always 

 roused the wonder of the ignorant, and continue a perpetual 

 stimulus to the curiosity of the learned. Where record is 

 wanting the abiding facts of human nature are our safest guides. 



