In America, also, gigantic structures were erected by the aborigines who lived in the Stone Age, to commemorate and to protect their dead. They consist partly of large mounds of stones and earth, which are likewise often regular small hills, and partly of stone structures reminding one of the giants’ chambers. The majority of the mounds were doubtless mainly sepulchral; others may have been temple-hills or sacrificial mounds, defensive works or observatories. The objects buried with the occupants belong mostly to the Neolithic Period, and consist chiefly of stone weapons and tools, some rude, but others finely worked and polished. Some are of pure natural copper, which was beaten into shape cold with stone hammers. Besides these, and ornaments and pottery, an American specialty is found in the form of tobacco-pipes carved from stone, some of which give interesting representations of men and animals; this seems to prove that tobacco also played a part in the American funeral rites of those times. The graves of the Neolithic Period not only indicate that mankind generally was endowed with the same gifts as regards the first principles of the art of building, but they also afford us a glimpse of the mental life of that period of civilisation which at a more or less distant period was spread over the whole earth. What is so characteristic is the affectionate care for the corpse, for whose protection no amount of labour and trouble appeared too great. We can have no doubt that this reverence was based on a belief in the immortality of the soul--a belief which we find also at the present day among the most backward and abandoned “savages.” That the prehistoric men of the Stone Age held this belief is proved by the ornaments, weapons, implements, and food placed with the dead for use in the next world. Their burial customs certainly express a kind of worship of departed souls which has played and still plays so important a part in the religious ideas of all primitive peoples, and is one of the oldest fundamental notions common to mankind. [Illustration: G. Nordenskiöld HOW STONE AGE MAN WAS BURIED Photograph of an actual skeleton, in position of burial, taken from a prehistoric mound grave in North America. ] [Illustration: THE STRANGE RELIGION OF THE STONE AGE: A DRUID CEREMONY AT STONEHENGE A vivid illustration, from an old print, of the purposes of the mysterious stone circles common in Celtic countries ] [Illustration: THE WORLD BEFORE HISTORY--VI Professor JOHANNES RANKE] WHEN HISTORY WAS DAWNING The discovery of Drift Man, his distinction from man of the later Stone Age, the investigation of the Palæolithic and Neolithic strata of culture of Europe and of the whole earth, and the scientific reconstruction of the earliest forms of civilisation based on these, are due solely to the natural-science method of research.