654 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
man all over the world left at the grave of his dead. This custom is not a mark 
of savagery however; Sophocles introduced in the tragedy of Electra the cere- 
mony of placing food upon the grave of the murdered Agamemnon, and the 
Chinese, Egyptians and Assyrians invariably supplied their dead with abundant 
food and drink for their journey to the spirit land. It is noticeable that while 
certain customs of the Mound-builders were never departed from in their long 
journey, the mode of observance was varied in many ways. For instance in 
British Columbia a piece of quartz is frequently found among the funereal relics ; 
in some instances this is replaced by a piece of coal, and this again, during their 
later pilgrimage, by a piece of mica quarried in the Alleghany Mountains. It 
was also usual to deposit with the dead manufactured articles ; and it is likely 
that this custom arose from the world-wide superstition against the use of prop- 
erty which belonged to a dead person — the natural result of which would be to 
place them in his grave that he might use them in the spirit world. While the 
burial mounds contain by far the most of the surviving relics of their builders, 
yet all the tumuli, except those designated as altar or sacrificial, have yielded 
along with archseological treasures, the mouldering bones of this ancient race. 
It may as well be stated here that mound burial was more common in northern 
latitudes than under the southern cross. In the course of the centuries that must 
have passed between the time of their exodus from British Columbia, and the 
time the lower Mississippi was reached, there was sufficient space for the rise of 
new forms of burial. Among these may be noted cave-burial, urn-burial, burial 
in stone graves and in sepulchres formed partly by nature, partly by artificial 
means, in the face of cHffs and exposed rocky strata. Sometimes there are 
found trenches and pits filled with human bones; these are perhaps the deposi- 
tories where the common herd of what must have been a dense population re- 
ceived scant honors of sepulture. Occasionally masses of bones are found under 
terraces of earth, or stone, which probably are of similar origin. On Van- 
couver's Island the dead were usually buried in a basin-shaped hole and covered 
with a slab before the mound was heaped above them ; and mounds in Wiscon- 
sin have been found where the body was deposited in similar excavations. 
It is probable that an examination of the vast unexplored regions extending from 
the Red River to the mountains will show this mode of burial to have been com- 
monly practiced. 
The observatory mounds were simply signal stations; and systems of them 
have been traced, so sagaciously arranged that communications between com- 
munities, hundreds of miles apart, could be passed along as rapidly as a modern 
telegram. 
The mounds which are supposed to have been used to erect dwellings upon, 
differ somewhat in form from the others. Usually they are small platforms of 
earth elevated from two to fifty feet above the surface and of varying dimensions ; 
one of these constitutes a terrace of the great Cahokia mound and communicates 
with it by a graded way. Among other indeterminate forms are the animal 
mounds of Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri and the Arkansas Valley. Some of these 
