At Halsaflieni, in Malta, we have perhaps examples of the curious custom of secondary interment; the body is buried temporarily in some suitable place, and after the flesh has left the bones the latter are collected and thrown together into a common ossuary. That the bones at Halsaflieni were placed there when free from flesh is probable from the closeness with which they were packed together (see p. 111). There are also possible examples in Sicily (see p. 79). The custom was not unknown in neolithic days, especially in Crete. It is still occasionally practised on the island and on the Greek mainland, where, after the dead have lain a few years in hallowed soil, their bones are dug up, roughly cleaned, and deposited in caves. CHAPTER X WHO WERE THE BUILDERS, AND WHENCE DID THEY COME? Modern discussion of the origin of the megalithic monuments may be said to date from Bertrand's publication of the French examples in 1864. In this work Bertrand upheld the thesis that "the dolmens and _allees couvertes_ are sepulchres; and their origin seems up to the present to be northern." In 1865 appeared Bonstetten's famous _Essai sur les dolmens_, in which he maintained that the dolmens were constructed by one and the same people spreading over Europe from north to south. At this time the dolmens of North Africa were still unstudied. In 1867 followed an important paper by Bertrand. In 1872 two events of importance to the subject occurred, the publication of Fergusson's _Rude Stone Monuments in All Countries_, and the discussion raised at the Brussels Congress by General Faidherbe's paper on the dolmens of Algeria. Faidherbe maintained the thesis that dolmens, whether in Europe or Africa, were the work of a single people moving southward from the Baltic Sea. The question thus raised has been keenly debated since. At the Stockholm Congress in 1874 de Mortillet advanced the theory that megalithic monuments in different districts were due to different peoples, and that what spread was the custom of building such structures and not the builders themselves. This theory has been accepted by most archaeologists, including Montelius, Salomon Reinach, Sophus Mueller, Hoernes, and Dechelette. But while the rest believe the influences which produced the megalithic monuments to have spread from east to west, i.e. from Asia to Europe, Salomon Reinach holds the contrary view, which he has supported in a remarkable paper called _Le Mirage Oriental_, published in 1893. The questions we have to discuss are, therefore, as follows: Are all the megalithic monuments due to a single race or to several? If to a single race, whence did that race come and in what direction did it move? If to several, did the idea of building megalithic structures arise among the several races independently, or did it spread from one to another?