The Vishnavites burn their dead; the worshippers of Siva bury them, deliver them up to beasts of prey, or throw them into the holy river Ganges. Folks who are too poor to dispose of their deceased by burning, also consign them to the waves of the holy stream. This is done at night, since it is against the law. It is not unusual to see a whole procession of corpses float down the Ganges, while crows feed on the remains. At Calcutta, cremation is performed within the “Burning Ghât,” outside the city, in a walled enclosure which is frequented by numberless vultures and other birds of prey, near the Hoogly, as the Ganges is thereabouts called. This place is seldom visited by the British inhabitants of Calcutta; for they regard this rude cineration (properly so) far too horrible to witness. By order of the government, a cinerator was built on the banks of the Hoogly, which is used only by a part of the Hindoo population. The Hindoos are hard to wean from their old-fashioned method of cineration (which is substantially the same as that practiced by the ancient Romans and Greeks), and, therefore, seldom make use of a cinerator, as Mr. William Eassie was informed by the sanitary commissioner of Madras, where a cinerary apparatus had also been erected. The commissioner, however, was of the opinion that if the Siemens principle of a furnace were exhibited before the educated Hindoos, they would very probably adopt it. [Illustration: CREMATION AMONG THE TOLKOTINS OF OREGON.] Thanks to the efforts of the British authorities in India, imperfect cremation is a thing of the past there. Cicero already relates that the widows of the Hindoos allow themselves to be cinerated with the remains of their husbands. Self-cremation of Indian widows does not occur nowadays; the barbaric custom has been put down by the English. It was not before 1831 that the English government in Hindostan attempted to abolish the practice of burning widows; and up to that time, as Max Mueller observes, “women were burned wholesale, even in the immediate neighborhood of Calcutta.” But the custom was probably not exterminated before late in the sixties—1868 or 69. Cremation was practiced on the isle of Ceylon as late as 1841.