dutiful respect, tempered, as some will have it, with fear. It may be submitted that, just as the Bedouin Arabs are wont to set up groups of stones around the burial-place of a fakir, so the chief members of a prehistoric tribe, each carrying his portion, produced the accumulation of flint spalls. True; but this does not support the suggested explanation that the flakes were strike-a-lights. So soon as the multiplication of fire-kindlers--if we assume that the flakes were at first of this nature--reached to the extent of filling an urn or cist, utility must have been the waning, and reverence the waxing principle. The idea that material objects could benefit the dead lingered, it is true, for ages, and in some half-hearted manner persisted, as we shall see, until our own day, but it was ultimately overpowered by the growth of symbolical rites. It remains to notice Pitt-Rivers’ theory that the broken pottery may have been buried to mark the site of a barrow, but how this mode of indication could be effective that cautious and experienced investigator does not suggest. In a boundary tumulus, entombed pottery might be significant, but even there, it could not form a visible memorial. Reverting for a moment to the subject of fire-kindlers, I would remark that many of the objects known to archaeologists as flint “scrapers” were probably ignition agents[729]. Consequently, to call such flints “thumb-scrapers,” or oval scrapers, as is often done by the barrow-digger, is to push aside a debateable question by means of an assumption. Scrapers they may have been, but it is at least permissible to believe that they were also fire-producers. In due time, the strike-a-light became a specialized article, but both scraper and fire-kindler continued to find a place in the grave. Pliny speaks of the discovery of mirrors and “body-scrapers” (_specula quoque, et strigiles_)[730], in ancient tombs. These strigils, which Philemon Holland quaintly renders “currycombes[731],” and Littré, as _instruments pour les oreilles_[732], were actually, in Roman days, the scrapers of horn or metal, used by the bather to remove impurities from the skin. Thus, considered as a scraper, the strigil reaches back to the rounded flint with trimmed edges, and forward to the Mediaeval “sleeker” of stone or metal, employed by the currier in tawing hides. As a “slick-stone” of black glass, degraded, doubtless, to the ornamental stage, the object again appears in Islay, associated with a burial of the Viking period[733]. Later records of the scraper, and of the strike-a-light, definitely illustrative of the theory of funeral gifts, seem to be lacking.