ith his full
consent) on the land of his fathers.

Why did these bronze-age people burn instead of burying their dead? Why
did they anticipate the latest fashionable mode of disposal of corpses,
and go in for cremation with such thorough conviction? They couldn't
have been influenced by those rather unpleasant sanitary considerations
which so profoundly agitated the mind of 'Graveyard Walker.' Sanitation
was still in a very rudimentary state in the year five thousand B.C.;
and the ingenious Celt, who is still given to 'waking' his neighbours,
when they die of small-pox, with a sublime indifference to the chances
of infection, must have had some other and more powerful reason for
adopting the comparatively unnatural system of cremation in preference
to that of simple burial. The change, I believe, was due to a further
development of religious ideas on the part of the Celtic tribesmen above
that of the primitive stone-age cannibals.

When men began to bury their dead, they did so in the firm belief in
another life, which life was regarded as the exact counterpart of this
present one. The unsophisticated savage, holding that in that equal sky
his faithful dog would bear him company, naturally enough had the dog
in question killed and buried with him, in order that it might follow
him to the happy hunting-grounds. Clearly, you can't hunt without your
arrows and your tomahawk; so the flint weapons and the trusty bow
accompanied their owner in his new dwelling-place. The wooden haft, the
deer-sinew bow-string, the perishable articles of food and drink have
long since decayed within the damp tumulus: but the harder stone and
earthenware articles have survived till now, to tell the story of that
crude and simple early faith. Very crude and illogical indeed it was,
however, for it is quite clear that the actual body of the dead man was
thought of as persisting to live a sort of underground life within the
barrow. A stone hut was constructed for its use; real weapons and
implements were left by its side; and slaves and wives were ruthlessly
massacred, as still in Ashantee, in order that their bodies might
accompany the corpse of the buried master in his subterranean dwelling.
In all this we have clear evidence of a very inconsistent, savage,
materialistic belief, not indeed in the immortality of the soul, but in
the continued underground life of the dead body.

With the progress of time, however, men's ideas upon these subjects