Returning to the shards alluded to by the priest at Ophelia’s grave, we note, as an illustration, that Pitt-Rivers found considerable quantities of broken pottery in the Romano-British graves of Dorset and Wiltshire. A remarkable coincidence must now be mentioned. Douglas, writing his _Nenia Britannica_ in 1793, had noticed that pebbles and fragments of pottery were often mixed with the earth which had been scattered over the corpses in Saxon graves. The shards were generally of more ancient date than the interment[715]. Douglas had lighted upon the passage in _Hamlet_, already quoted, and had connected it with the superstitious Saxon practice. Over half a century later, Mr W. M. Wylie, who was exploring Saxon graves at Fairford, in Gloucestershire, came upon quantities of similar burial shards. The vessels which had furnished the fragments had not been newly broken for the occasion, since the pieces did not correspond, but had been previously collected and kept in readiness. Along with these potsherds were found pebbles that had been fired, as well as scoriae from iron smeltings, obtained perhaps from the neighbourhood of Cirencester, not far away[716]. After referring to the description of the Scythian custom, which has just been quoted from Herodotus, and after making a half-hearted attempt to connect the Scythians with the Northern Teutons, Wylie cites the now-famous lines from _Hamlet_. That Wylie should have independently come to the same conclusion as Douglas, and should have called attention to the same Shakespearean allusion, is very noteworthy, for he had never read Douglas’s work[717].