The wide diffusal of burial over the globe is also a strong argument for its relatively primitive origin. In all parts of the world men now bury their dead, or did once bury them. From the Tombs of the Kings at Pekin to the Pyramids of Memphis; from the Peruvian caves to the Samoyed graveyards, we find most early peoples, most savage peoples, most primitive peoples, once or still engaged in one or other form of burying. Burial is the common and universal mode; burning, exposure, throwing into a sacred river, and so forth, are sporadic and exceptional, and in many cases, as among the Hindus, are demonstrably of late origin, and connected with certain relatively modern refinements of religion. Once more, in many or most cases, we have positive evidence that where a race now burns its dead, it used once {056}to bury them. Burial preceded burning in preheroic Greece, as it also did in Etruria and in early Latium. The people of the Long Barrows, in Western Europe generally, buried their dead; the people of the Round Barrows who succeeded them, and who possessed a far higher grade of culture, almost always cremated. It has been assumed that burning is primordial in India; but Mr. William Simpson, the well-known artist of the _Illustrated London News_, calls my attention to the fact that the Vedas speak with great clearness of burial as the usual mode of disposing of the corpse, and even allude to the tumulus, the circle of stones around it, and the sacred _temenos_ which they enclose. According to Rajendralala Mitra, whose high authority on the subject is universally acknowledged, burial was the rule in India till about the thirteenth or fourteenth century before the Christian era; then came in cremation, with burial of the ashes, and this continued till about the time of Christ, when burial was dispensed with, and the ashes were thrown into some sacred river. I think, therefore, until some more positive evidence is adduced on the other side, we may rest content with our general conclusion that burial is the oldest, most universal, and most savage mode of disposing of the remains of the dead among humanity after the general recognition of death as a positive condition. It probably took its rise in an early period, while mankind was still one homogeneous species; and it has been dispersed, accordingly, over the whole world, even to the most remote oceanic islands. What is the origin of this barbaric and disgusting custom, so repugnant to all the more delicate sentiments of human nature? I think Mr. Frazer is right in attributing it to the terror felt by the living for the ghosts (or, rather, at first the corpses) of the dead, and the fear that they may return to plague or alarm their surviving fellow tribesmen.