eventually abolished the practice.[65] What would they have said if they had lived to see their revered dead and their sacred animals carted away and sold as a drug, or worse still, as a manure? Professor Coletti has wisely remarked that when a man passes over to the majority[66] he should speedily become 'a handful of simple earth and nothing more.' [64] See the body of Mrs. Van Butchell, embalmed by Dr. Hunter and Mr. Carpenter in 1775. [65] Walker. [66] What a majority this must be, if the human skeleton from the Florida Reef is rightly estimated by Agassiz at 10,000 years old, the Egyptian relics from the Limant Bay borings by Rosière at 30,000, the remains from the New Orleans forest by Dowler at 50,000 years, and if the human bones found at the Illinois river, at Natchez, at Calaveras, at Anguilla Island, and in the Ashley river, are correctly stated by Schmidt, Dickeson, Whitney, Rijgersma, Holmes, Lubbock, and others, as contemporaneous with the mammoth and mastodon! There is a system of burial somewhat analogous to embalming, which consists of drying up the body, and then interring it. The ancient Peruvians used to dry their dead in the sun, and inter them in a sitting posture, bound in cotton cloth, the quantity of saltpetre in the ground completing the desiccation.[67] The Huacas or huge pyramidal burial mounds of these people, which were so constructed that each added body, with its funeral accessories, had its own clay-mortar enclosure, prove also that some rude attempt at embalmment was practised.[68] To the present day races are discovered which possess some knowledge of the art. A tribe in South Australia practise the following system. They place the deceased in a sitting posture near the top of the hut, and keep up fires until the body is dry, when they proceed to bandage it. Eventually they hide it away amongst the branches of trees.[69] In another remote part of the world, Japan, the Aino aboriginals, when a chief dies, lay the body out at the door of the hut, remove the viscera, and wash it daily in the sun for a whole year. When completely dried, the remains are put in a coffin and buried.[70] In India beyond the Ganges, the Looshais also practise a desiccation of the dead.[71] And the manner in which the body of our noble traveller Dr. Livingstone was prepared previous to bringing him home, would seem to point to the prevalence of such a custom, or to the tradition of one, amongst the African races. [67] Hutchinson. [68] Bradley. [69] Hutchinson. [70] St. John. [71] Dr. A. Campbell.