Stakes or wooden posts are often used all the world over as marks of an interment. Like other grave-marks, they also share naturally in the honours paid to the ghost or nascent god. But they are less important as elements in the growth of religion than standing stones for two distinct reasons. In the first place, a stake or post most often marks the interment of a person of little social consideration; chiefs and great men have usually stone monuments erected in their honour; the commonalty have to be satisfied with wooden marks, as one may observe to this day at Père Lachaise, or any other great Christian cemetery. In the second place, the stone monument is far more lasting and permanent than the wooden one. Each of these points counts for something. For it is {128}chiefs and great men whose ghosts most often grow into gods; and it is the oldest ghosts, the oldest gods, the oldest monuments that are always the most sacred. For both these reasons, then, the stake is less critical than the stone in the history of religion. Nevertheless, it has its own special importance. As the sacred stone derives ultimately from the great boulder piled above the grave to keep down the corpse, so the stake, I believe, derives from the sharp-pointed stick driven through the body to pin it down as we saw in the third chapter, and still so employed in Christian England to prevent suicides from walking. Such a stake or pole is usually permitted to protrude from the ground, so as to warn living men of the neighbourhood of a spirit. At a very early date, however, the stake, I fancy, became a mere grave-mark; and though, owing to its comparative inconspicuousness, it obtains relatively little notice, it is now and always has been by far the most common mode of preserving the memory of the spot where a person lies buried. A good example, which will throw light upon many subsequent modifications, is given by Mr. Wyatt Gill from Port Moresby in New Guinea. “The body,” he says, “was buried. At the side was set up a stake, to which were tied the spear, club, bow and arrow of the deceased, but broken, to prevent theft. A little beyond was the grave of a woman: her cooking utensils, grass petticoats, etc., hung up on the stake.” Similar customs, he adds, are almost universal in Polynesia.