74 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
the position of the body (usually on the side and contracted with knees and 
hands near the chin), and the direction of the head. 
The occurrence of charcoal in graves with apparently unhurnt bodies is 
accounted for by the supposition that the idea of the necessity of burning, 
as a rite, or the passing the body through fire, the Purifier, survived the 
practice of actual and perfect cremation, just as aspersion takes the place of 
complete immersion in some forms of baptism. 
Traces of personal dress in the burials are rare, but sufficient to render it 
probable that the body was interred in its clothes or in some kind of shroud. 
Remains of woollen and leathern garments have been met with ; but more 
frequently there are dress-fasteners, such as bone-pins, buttons of jet, stone, 
and bone, also jet and bone rings or loops, round or oval, to hold bands or 
belts together, besides the pins, brooches, and armlets of bronze in the 
barrows of later date. 
Carefully prepared flint weapons and tools, and highly polished stone 
axes are well known to the mound-diggers. Indeed, our author states that 
“ The barrows are found to contain examples of almost all the stone imple- 
ments which occur elsewhere.” On the contrary, bronze implements are 
represented by few forms (the plain axe, dagger, knife, drill, knife-dagger, 
and awl) in the barrows; the spear-heads, swords, flanged axes (paal- 
stabs), socketed celts, gouges, and chisels, turned up in hoards, not having 
been found with these burials. The plain axe of bronze, simply moulded 
after the form of the stone axe, seems to have been the earliest type, from 
which later modifications arose; and these mound-buried people were of 
too early a date to know any other. 
Their personal ornaments were not very elaborate, nor were they made of 
gold, glass, ivory, or amber, so far as these researches show. They do not 
appear to have had any wealth, nor hides or grain to spare for exchange ; 
and possibly they got their bronze and jet by plundering their neighbours. 
The “ pottery of the barrows,” carefully studied and richly illustrated, is 
regarded as having been prepared for the sepulchre alone ;* the domestic 
vessels, well known on sites of habitations, being of a different manufacture, 
harder and more useful, and destitute of ornament. With all these matters 
are nearly concerned the social condition of the people (beyond the mere 
hunting state, and with gradations of society), their domesticated animals 
(few, and not clearly indicated : possibly ox, goat, sheep, horse, and pig), 
their progress in manufactures and art, and their belief in a future life ; and 
these interesting points are lucidly handled in this Introduction. The en- 
trenchments on the Wolds probably mark the living-places of this long-past 
* As these vessels were spiritual , and known to be practically useless, it is 
quite possible that the Jlakes, potsherds , and sometimes pebbles , so freely mixed 
with the earth of mounds, and thrown into graves of much later date (pages 
11 and 12), may have been (certainly in earliest times) still more significant 
of the appliances of every-day life for the deceased. They would directly 
represent his weapons and tools, his strike-a-light and boiling-stones, and his 
means for dipping water and carrying hot embers. Poor indeed was the 
greatest of the heroes, on his dreary death-path, who had not “ a sherd to 
take fire from the hearth, or to take water withal out of the pit.” ( Isaiah 
xxx. 14.) 
