In these funeral rites the disposal of the corpse depended upon ethnic traits, ancestral usage, or the instructions of the priests. Perhaps the earliest was simple exposure. The body was left in the forest for the beasts and birds to consume, as among the Caddo Indians and others; or it was sunk in the waters that the fish should perform the same office; the usual object being to obtain the bones with the least trouble. The oldest of all burials yet discovered, those in the caves in the south of France, were of this character, simple “seposition” as it is called. The body was merely laid in a posture of repose on the cave floor, with the weapons and ornaments it had used during life.[259] Next in point of time doubtless came inhumation, the interment of the body in the ground or covering it, laid on the surface, with stones and earth,—the burial mound. Homeric Greeks, American Indians, and tribes of all continents practised this method in different ages, and the barrows or tumuli thus erected remain in thousands to this day to attest the religious earnestness of those early peoples. The vast monuments which at times they constructed for their dead, the pyramids, dolmens, and teocalli, have never since been equalled in magnitude or cubical contents. Another and significant funeral rite of high antiquity is that of cremation or incineration. It was symbolic in character, the body being given to the flames in order that the spirit, by their purifying agency, should promptly be set free and united with the gods. This method also prevailed extensively among the American race, and was quite in consonance with their opinions of the after-life. “It is the one passion of his superstition,” writes Mr. Powers of the Californian Indian, “to think of the soul of his departed friend as set free, and purified by the flames; not bound to the mouldering body, but borne up on the soft clouds of the smoke toward the beautiful sun.”[260] Other peoples entertained the opinion that the body as it is, in all its parts, must be preserved in order that it might be again habitable for the soul, when this ethereal essence should return to earth from its celestial wanderings. Therefore, with utmost care they sought for means to preserve the fleshly tenement. In Virginia, in some parts of South America, on the Madeira Islands, the aboriginal population dried the corpse over a slow fire into a condition that resisted decay; while elsewhere, the nitrous soil of caves offered a natural means of embalming. The Alaskan and Peruvian mummies, like those of ancient Egypt, were artificially prepared and swathed in numerous cerecloths. In all, the same faith in the literal resurrection of the flesh was the prevailing motive.