road hoop or basket of
thinly cut wood, and adjoining the center portions are pieces of
body armor composed of reeds bound together. The body is covered
with the fine skin of the sea-otter, always a mark of distinction in
the interments of the Aleuts, and round the whole package are
stretched the meshes of a fish-net, made of the sinews of the sea
lion; also those of a bird-net. There are evidently some bulky
articles inclosed with the chief's body, and the whole package
differs very much from the others, which more resemble, in their
brown-grass matting, consignments of crude sugar from the Sandwich
Islands than the remains of human beings. The bodies of a pappoose
and of a very little child, which probably died at birth or soon
after it, have sea-otter skins around them. One of the feet of the
latter projects, with a toe-nail visible. The remaining mummies are
of adults.

One of the packages has been opened, and it reveals a man's body in
tolerable preservation, but with a large portion of the face
decomposed. This and the other bodies were doubled up at death by
severing some of the muscles at the hip and knee joints and bending
the limbs downward horizontally upon the trunk. Perhaps the most
peculiar package, next to that of the chief, is one which incloses
in a single matting, with sea-lion skins, the bodies of a man and
woman. The collection also embraces a couple of skulls, male and
female, which have still the hair attached to the scalp. The hair
has changed its color to a brownish red. The relics obtained with
the bodies include a few wooden vessels scooped out smoothly:
a piece of dark, greenish, flat stone, harder than the emerald,
which the Indians use to tan skins; a scalp-lock of jet-black hair;
a small rude figure, which may have been a very ugly doll or an
idol; two or three tiny carvings in ivory of the sea-lion, very
neatly executed; a comb, a necklet made of bird's claws inserted
into one another, and several specimens of little bags, and a cap
plaited out of sea-grass and almost water-tight.

In Cary's translation of Herodotus (1853, p. 180) the following passage
occurs which purports to describe the manner in which the Macrobrian
Ethiopians preserved their dead. It is added, simply as a matter of
curious interest, nothing more, for no remains so preserved have ever
been discovered.

After this, they visited last of all their sepul