Again, certain nations go further still in their endeavours to keep the ghost (or corpse) from roaming. The corpse of a Damara, says Galton, having been sewn up in an old ox-hide is buried in a hole, and the spectators jump backwards {058}and forwards over the grave to keep the deceased from rising out of it. In America, the Tupis tied fast all the limbs of the corpse, “that the dead man might not be able to get up, and infest his friends with his visits.” You may even divert a river from its course, as Mr. Frazer notes, bury your dead man securely in its bed, and then allow the stream to return to its channel. It was thus that Alaric was kept in his grave from further plaguing humanity; and thus Captain Cameron found a tribe of Central Africans compelled their deceased chiefs to “cease from troubling.” Sometimes, again, the grave is enclosed by a fence too high for the dead man to clear even with a running jump; and sometimes the survivors take the prudent precaution of nailing the body securely to the coffin, or of breaking their friend’s spine, or even--but this is an extreme case--of hacking him to pieces. In Christian England the poor wretch whom misery had driven to suicide was prevented from roaming about to the discomfort of the lieges by being buried with a stake driven barbarously through him. The Australians, in like manner, used to cut off the thumb of a slain enemy that he might be unable to draw the bow; and the Greeks were wont to hack off the extremities of their victims in order to incapacitate them for further fighting. These cases will be seen to be very luminiferous when we come to examine the origin and meaning of cremation. Burial, then, I take it, is simply by origin a means adopted by the living to protect themselves against the vagrant tendencies of the actual dead. For some occult reason, the vast majority of men in all ages have been foolishly afraid of meeting with the spirits of the departed. Their great desire has been, not to see, but to avoid seeing these singular visitants; and for that purpose they invented, first of all, burial, and afterwards cremation.