THE HURON RACE AND ITS HEAD-FORM. 121 



and then, amid the shrieks and wails of the mourners, the earth was- 

 thrown in, logs and stones piled over the cemetery, and with a closing 

 funeral chaunt, the Great Feast of the Dead was brought to an end. 



Peculiar as these sepulchral rites of the Hurons and other American 

 Indian tribes were, thej^ are not without some parallel in the old world. 

 Captain Thomas, R.N., in exploring a subterranean chambered cata- 

 comb at Taransay, in the Island of Harris, in the Hebrides, found 

 a number of human skulls and bones so arranged as to prove that 

 they had been deposited there long subsequent to death. Mr. 

 Thomas Bateman, also, in his '' Ten Years' Diggings in Celtic and 

 Saxon Grave-hills," describes the discovery, in the centre of a large 

 barrow, near Youlgrave, Derbyshire, enclosed in a rectangular stone 

 cist, of the bones composing the skeleton of an aged man, care- 

 fully arranged in a heap, the long bones laid parallel with each other^ 

 and the whole surmounted by the skull. The bones were so perfect 

 that Mr. Bateman adds, '* it is evident this arrangement had been made 

 while they were fresh and strong." An imperfect skeleton found in 

 one of the Cromlechs discovered in the Phoenix Park, Dublin, in 1838, 

 had also, in the opinion of Dr. Robert Ball, been collected from some 

 other place and deposited there. It is to be noted, however, that the 

 two latter cases were accompanied by other interments, where the 

 bodies had been buried in the flexed posture common in early British 

 sepulture. Among the Hurons, on the contrary, inhumation was the 

 exceptional mode of disposing of the dead, and for the most part only 

 temporary. 



Owing to the systematic practice of thus gathering together the 

 remains of the Huron dead, one or more ossuaries were to be looked for 

 in the vicinity of each Huron village. Dr. Tache explored sixteen 

 of them in all, containing from six hundred to twelve hundred skele- 

 tons each. From the same depositories he also recovered numerous 

 specimens of native art, and illustrations of the peculiar customs of 

 that people. Among them are included implements, weapons, pottery, 

 stone-pipes, clay-tubes, large tropical shells specially prized by all the 

 northern tribes, the native wampum, kettles, knives, and personal orna- 

 ments of copper, beads, and other relics of European workmanship. 

 One prized object of the latter class is a fragment of one of the Jesuit 

 Mission church-bells. Dr. Tache is also of opinion that some of the 

 copper articles are of Mexican origin. There is no doubt that a traffic 

 by the Mississippi route furnished them, through indirect barter, with 



