Cremation was the prevailing custom from remote ages in Scythia, or what is now called Tartary, and we are free to believe that its origin was similarly a hygienic one. The Scythians were the progenitors of the Thracians, and we read that these latter observed incineration from the earliest date.[4] The Thracians in their turn introduced the practice amongst the Greeks, although it is possible that a portion of the Hellenes learnt it from the Phrygians, who again very probably obtained it from India. The Greeks, too, evidently adopted it from motives of sanitary reform; at all events, there was no religious question involved in it. About 1500 B.C., the Greeks invariably buried their dead;[5] they had not learnt the valuable lesson. They do not seem to have burned them either in the ninth century before Christ, for the Institutes of Lycurgus specify the manner in which burial was to be performed. In the time of Socrates, however, 500 B.C., cremation appears to have become optional, for Plato makes Socrates say that he did not care whether he was burned or buried. It was, however, common enough about 100 B.C.; I myself have dug up on the site of Dardanus relics of this kind of sepulture. Time rolled on, and in their turn the Romans, who also originally inhumed,[6] borrowed the salutary practice, performing it first inside the city, and then extramurally. It did not become general in Rome, however, until towards the close of the Republic. Towards the end of the fourth century it became much neglected, and finally the Christians, inimical to the practice, although it was nowhere forbidden in the New Testament, made haste to abolish it in Europe. Burial and burning appear to have been practised contemporaneously for some little time, on our own Yorkshire wolds for example,[7] but ultimately the former triumphed. [4] Herodotus. [5] Cicero. [6] Pliny. [7] Canon Greenwell.