or from other motives not unconnected with selfishness, the onus of discharging the more active and laborious obligations prescribed in popular funeral rites has bit by bit been altogether shifted upon the shoulders of the weaker sex; _e.g._, in places where scratching and tearing of the face forms part of the traditional ritual, the women are expected to continue the performance of this unpleasant ceremony which the men have long since abandoned. Together with the dirge, a more or less serious measure of self-disfigurement has come down from an early date. An Etruscan funeral urn, discovered at Clusi, shows an exact picture of the hired mourners who tear their hair and rend their garments, whilst one stands apart, in a prophetic attitude, and declaims to the accompaniment of a flute. Of the precise origin of the employment of Public Wailers, or Praeficae, not much has been ascertained. One distinguished writer on folk-lore suggests that it had its rise not in any lack of consideration for the dead, but in the apprehension lest the repose of their ghosts should be disturbed by a display of grief on the part of those who had been nearest and dearest to them in life; and his theory gains support in the abundant evidence forthcoming to attest the existence of a widely-spread notion that the dead are pained, and even annoyed and exasperated, by the tears of their kindred. Traces of this belief are discoverable in Zend and Hindu writings; also amongst the Sclavs, Germans, and Scandinavians--and, to look nearer home, in Ireland and Scotland. On the other hand, it is possible that the business of singing before the dead sprang from the root of well-nigh every trade--that its duties were at first exclusively performed by private persons, and their passing into public hands resulted simply from people finding out that they were executed with less trouble and more efficiency by a professional functionary; a common-place view of the matter which is somewhat borne out by the circumstance, that whenever a member of the family is qualified and disposed to undertake the dirge-singing, there seems to be no prejudice against her doing so. It is often far from easy to determine whether such or such a death-song was composed by a hired praefica who for the time being assumed the character of one of the dead man's relatives, or by the latter speaking in her own person.