158 METHODS OF BUUIAL. 



their ordinary habitations; and they place, all around, the 

 bodies of their dead horses, raised upon their feet and supported 

 with sticks. 



" The Tehuelhet, or more southern Patagonians, differ in 

 some respects from the other Indians. After having dried the 

 bones of their dead, they carry them to a great distance from 

 their habitations, into the desert by the sea-coast ; and after 

 placing them in their proper form, and adorning them in the 

 manner before described, they set them in order above ground, 

 under a hut or tent erected for that purpose, with the skeletons 

 of their dead horses placed around them. 



" In the expedition of the year 1746, some Spanish soldiers, 

 with one of the missionaries, travelling about thirty leagues 

 within land, to the west of Port San Julian, found one of these 

 Indian sepulchres, containing three skeletons, and having as 

 many dead horses propped up around it." 



In the expeditions of the Adventure and Beagle, between 

 1826 and 1834, a few burial places of another kind were exa- 

 mined. These were piles of stones, upon the summits of the 

 highest hills, on the eastern sea-coast. Some had been thrown 

 down and ransacked ; probably by the crews of sealing vessels: 

 others there was no opportunity of visiting : only one untouched 

 pile was found : and that one was examined by Lieutenant 

 Wickham. It was on a height, near Cape Dos Bahias, in latitude 

 forty-five south. Only bones were found, in a much decayed 

 state, under a pile of stones about four feet high ; and from 

 the remains of the bones Mr. Bynoe ascertained that they had 

 belonged to a woman of the ordinary stature. A pile of stones 

 on a neighbouring height had been pulled down by the crew 

 of a sealing vessel : under it were fragments of decayed bones, 

 which were thought too much injured by time and weather to 

 be worth removing; indeed they crumbled to the touch. 

 Under similar heaps of stones the ' gigantic skeletons' which 

 some voyagers have described, were said to have been found. 



Doubtless these several methods of disposing of the dead 

 are not those of one horde only, but of various tribes. But 

 I prefer mentioning all that is yet known of the subject, as 



