Coffey — PreJmtoric Cenotaphs. 23 



A few illustrations wliicli I extract, with references, from a lengthy 

 note to this statement, will make it clearer. 



In ancient !JIexico, when a trader died in a far countiy, the rela- 

 tions at home made a puppet of candlewood, adorned it with the usual 

 paper ornaments, mourned over, burnt it, and buried the ashes in 

 the usual way. SimiLirly soldiers who fell in battle were buried in 

 effigy (Bancroft, Native Races, ii., pp. 616, seq.). In Samoa the 

 relations spread out a sheet on the beach near where the man had 

 been drowned, or on the battle-field where he had fallen; they then 

 prayed, and the first thing that lighted on the sheet (grasshopper, 

 butterfly, or whatever it might be) was supposed to contain the soul 

 of the deceased, and was buried with all due ceremony (Turner, 

 Samoa, pp. 150, seq.). The Garuda-purana dii'ects that " if a man 

 dies in a remote place, or is killed by robbers in a forest, and his body 

 is not found, his son should make an effigy of the deceased with Kusa 

 grass, and then burn it on a funeral pile" with the usual ceremonies 

 (Monier Williams, Religious Tliought and Life in India, p. 300).^ In 

 China, during the reign of the Emperor Chan-tuk, in the first 

 century of the Christian era, it was enacted that if the bodies of 

 soldiers who fall in battle, or those of sailors who fall in naval 

 engagements, cannot be recovered, the spirits of such men shall be 

 called back by prayers and incantations, and that figures shall be 

 made either of paper or of wood for their reception, and be burned 

 with all the ordinary rites. . . . The custom is now universally 

 observed" (Gray, China, i., pp. 295, seq.'). 



In Madagascar, cenotaphs are erected for those whose bodies 

 cannot be found, and their ghosts are supposed to be allured thither 

 (Ellis, Ilisiory of Madagascar, i., p. 255). 



"Writers, who describe the burial customs of primitive peoples, 

 rarely mention the case where the body is missing. I have looked 

 through Herbert Spencer's Descriptive Sociology, and the only instances 

 given there are those from Mexico and Madagascar quoted above. 



The publications of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian 

 Institution, which describe so fully the customs of the native races of 

 America, are silent on this point. Mr. Frazer appears, in fact, to be 

 the only writer who has directed special attention to this branch of 

 burial customs. Yet the case of a missing body must have been 

 provided for wherever importance was attached to burial. At the 



1 See also W. Crooke's "Popular Eeligion and Folk-lore of iS'ortlieni India," 

 p. 231. 



