1870.] Be Mortuis. 349 



find valuable to him for barter in the land of spirits as he had done 

 in this world. In others the stock of arrow-heads was so enormous 

 we may well suppose the occupier of the mound had been a maker 

 of flint arrow-heads. 



The practices of modern savages often throw great light upon 

 these difficult points. 



Thus we find among the New Zealanders, if the owner dies, he 

 is coninionly buried in his house with all it contained.* The islanders 

 of Torres Straits also used their dwelling-huts as dead-houses. t 

 It is still more significant that the Esquimaux themselves frequently 

 leave the dead in the houses which they occupied when alive. J 

 We cannot, says Sir John Lubbock, compare the plan of a Scan- 

 dinavian " passage-grave " with that of an Esquimaux snow-house, 

 without being struck with the great similarity existing between them. 



Under these circumstances there seems much probability in the 

 view advocated by Professor Nilsson, the venerable archaeologist of 

 Sweden, that these " passage-graves " are a copy or adaptation of the 

 dwelling-house ; that the ancient inhabitants of Scandinavia, unable 

 to imagine a future altogether different from the present, or a world 

 quite unlike our own, showed their respect and affection for the dead 

 by burying with them those things which in life they had valued 

 most ; with women their ornaments, with warriors their weapons. 



They buried the house with its owner, and the grave was literally 

 the dwelling of the dead.§ 



From the foregoing premises we may venture to establish this 

 axiom, namely, that any people who accompanied the rites of inter- 

 ment of their dead by such evident indications of care and attention 

 as we find in a vast number of graves belonging to different periods 

 and races in "Western Europe and America, may be safely concluded 

 to have possessed a notion of a future state, whatever may have been 

 the name they ascribed to it ; and moreover they must have also 

 believed it possible, by their gifts and good offices, to assist their 

 departed friends into the spirit land. 



* Tylor, ' New Zealand and its Inhabitants,' p. 101. 

 t M'Gillivray, ' Voyage of Battle-snake,' vol. ii., p. 48. 

 % Boss' ■ Arctic Expedition,' 1829-33, p. 290. 

 § Lubbock, ' Pre-historic Times,' pp. 126-7. 



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