The ruling motives for such rites are to be sought elsewhere. In addition to the practical considerations which, as Sir Alfred Lyall has shown, are potent in the case of the Indian suttee, it is to be remembered that the memory of the great dead is a national asset of the highest value (as the memory of our parents is in the domestic circle), and that it is worth while going to great expense in order to perpetuate it. In an age before writing or epic poems existed, cruel sacrifices, pyramids, great tumuli, and other rude monuments were more necessary for this purpose than they are in our day. And if barbarians sacrificed human beings, do not we spend the financial equivalent of many human lives in statues, memorials, and otherwise useless funeral pageantry? The difference between them and us lies not so much in the motive as in the lower value placed by them on human life. The truth is that offerings to the dead, from a flower or a few grains of rice to a human victim, are partly a symbolical language addressed to the deceased, and partly constitute an appeal for sympathy by the mourners and a response by their friends. They symbolize the union of hearts among those who have suffered by a common bereavement. We must also allow something for the despair which counts nothing that is left of any value, and prompts the survivors to beating of breasts, tearing of garments, cutting the flesh, sitting in sackcloth and ashes, lavish expenditure, and even suicide. Yet it must be admitted that there is a broad, though secondary and lower, current of opinion, which holds that the dead benefit in some more or less obscure physical sense by the offerings at their tombs. Hirata believed that food offered to the dead loses its savour more rapidly than other food. The ghosts summoned up by Ulysses from Erebus eagerly lapped up the blood offered them. This, although poetry, no doubt represents a real belief. Mr. Andrew Lang mentions the case of an Irish peasant woman, who, when her husband died, killed his horse, and, to some one who reproached her for her folly, replied, "Would you have my man go about on foot in the next world?" But may we not suspect that the real motive of my countrywoman's action was to express dumbly to the world the love she bore her husband by sacrificing something which she valued highly, and that the answer quoted was nothing more than a consciously frivolous reason, invented for the benefit of an unsympathetic, dull-minded intruder? Whether or not the dead, apart from any physical benefit from funeral offerings, are grateful for the affectionate remembrance which they symbolize, it may be doubted whether the recognition of such a feeling on their part enters very largely into our motives. Was it for the gratification of Nelson's spirit that the column was erected in Trafalgar Square? Or do those who annually deposit primroses before the statue of Lord Beaconsfield think that his spirit is sensible of this observance?