bury in trees any young man who has violated tribal law by taking as
wife a woman who is forbidden to him; such an individual is always
buried directly in the ground."[253] Apparently these law-abiding
savages are not anxious that members of the criminal classes should be
born again and should have the opportunity of troubling society once
more.

[Sidenote: Different modes of disposing of the dead adopted in the same
tribe.]

I would call your attention particularly to the different modes of
burial thus accorded by these two tribes to different classes of
persons. It is too commonly assumed that each tribe has one uniform way
of disposing of all its dead, say either by burning or by burying, and
on that assumption certain general theories have been built as to the
different views taken of the state of the dead by different tribes. But
in point of fact the assumption is incorrect. Not infrequently the same
tribe disposes of different classes of dead people in quite different
ways; for instance, it will bury some and burn others. Thus amongst the
Angoni of British Central Africa the corpses of chiefs are burned with
all their household belongings, but the bodies of commoners are buried
with all their belongings in caves.[254] In various castes or tribes of
India it is the custom to burn the bodies of married people but to bury
the bodies of the unmarried.[255] With some peoples of India the
distinction is made, not between the married and the unmarried, but
between adults and children, especially children under two years old; in
such cases the invariable practice appears to be to burn the old and
bury the young. Thus among the Malayalis of Malabar the bodies of men
and women are burned, but the bodies of children under two years are
buried, and so are the bodies of all persons who have died of cholera or
small-pox.[256] The same distinctions are observed by the Nayars,
Kadupattans, and other castes or tribes of Cochin.[257] The old rule
laid down in the ancient Hindoo law-book _The Grihya-Sutras_ was that
children who died under the age of two should be buried, not burnt.[258]
The Bhotias of the Himalayas bury all children who have not yet obtained
their permanent teeth, but they burn all other people.[259] Among the
Komars the young are buried, and the old cremated.[260] The Coorgs bury
the bodies of women and of boys under sixteen years of age, but they
burn the bodies of men.[261] The Chukchansi Indians of California