The modes of disposal of the dead were various among the native races of America, and most of them may be matched by customs obtaining in the Eastern hemisphere or the Polynesian islands. The commonest method was some form of _inhumation_ in pits, graves, or holes in the ground, in stone graves or cysts, in mounds, beneath or in houses, or in caves. _Embalmment_, to a limited extent, was also practised, the corpse being wrapped in garments and made up into a bundle before being placed in the earth, a cave, charnel-house, or in a box mounted on a scaffold. _Surface-burial_ was in use in some districts, the corpse being placed in a pen, a hollow tree or log, or simply covered with loose earth, or bark, or rocks forming cairns. In several regions, at various times, _cremation_ was the rule, or at least a partial burning, the resulting bones and ashes being preserved by some tribes and scattered by others. _Aerial sepulture_ is the name given to another method, where the body was left in the cabin or wigwam, deposited on scaffolds or trees, in boxes or canoes, sometimes supported by posts, sometimes resting on the ground, placed in baskets perched on pinnacles of rock or hung to the branches of trees,--the last being the mode often adopted in the case of children. Lastly, some nations were accustomed to sink their dead beneath the water, or turn them adrift in canoes. It is manifest that many of these practices could not be shown, from the nature of the case or the limits of space, except by pictures or models; but certain forms are represented in the great stocking-foot-shaped jars of coarse earthenware which served as coffins in the Nicaraguan region, in cinerary urns, in bones and skulls prepared to be kept as a sacred heirloom in the family, and in various descriptions of mummies, swathed and unswathed, chiefly from Peru and from caves in Mexico.