The claims to antiquity vaunted by the Chinese next force upon attention their provisions against allowing the dead to interfere with the well-being of the living. As they believe themselves _perfect_, to alter any one custom is sacrilege punishable with death; hence they observe the same ceremonies now, that their ancestors did several thousand years ago. ‘Their tombs and sepulchres,’ says Mr. Sirr, ‘are always built outside the city walls, and usually upon a hill, which is planted with cypress and pine trees.’ In China nothing is so offensive to good breeding as the remotest allusion to death. A number of amusing periphrases are therefore resorted to when a hint of the subject is unavoidable; a funeral is called from the kind of mourning used: ‘A white affair.’ In Persia intramural burials are also forbidden. ‘The place of sepulture,’ says a Persian sage, ‘must be far from dwellings: near it must be no cultivation; nor the business necessarily attending the existence of dwellings; no habitation nor population must be near it.’ This is another ancient injunction in remarkable accordance with one of the recommendations of our modern sages, the Board of Health. The Mahommedans again show much better taste than Christians in their Mausoleums and burial-places—they never bury in their temples or within the walls of a town. Among the funeral customs of the other inhabitants of the East, that of burning the dead is of very great antiquity. The Jews adopted it only in emergencies. When Saul fell on the fatal field of Gilboa, and his body was left exposed by the enemy, it was burnt by his faithful followers (1 Samuel, chap, xxxi., v. 11–13). From a passage in the book of Amos (chap. vi., v. 10), it appears that the bodies of the dead were burnt in times of pestilence, no doubt on sanitary grounds. For the same reason, incineration has been habitually perpetuated in tropical climates, but has been accompanied unhappily with the most horrible superstitions, particularly in Hindustan, where it is associated with the self-sacrifice of the widow on the funeral pile of her dead husband. The origin of this last custom, as a religious rite, has been the subject of much investigation and discussion among learned Orientalists; but Colebrooke, in his paper on the ‘Duties of a Faithful Hindoo Widow,’ in the fourth volume of the _Asiatic Researches_, has shown that this, among other duties of a faithful widow, is prescribed by the ancient Sanscrit books of the Bramins. Bernier, the French traveller, who visited India at the time when this practice of self-immolation was very general, gives striking descriptions of several scenes of this kind which he witnessed. The heroine of one of them was a woman who had been engaged in some love intrigues with a young Mahommedan, her neighbour, who was a tailor, and could play finely on the tabor. This woman, in the hopes of marrying her paramour, poisoned her husband, and then told the tailor that it was time for