There has been considerable controversy as to the origin of the vast stone monuments in this region. The writer from whom I have just quoted, with many others, believed the Zimbabwe ruins to be the work of Early Sabæan or Phœnician immigrants, who were attracted by the Rhodesian gold-fields. Randall-MacIver believed that he found Chinese and Persian relics (no earlier than the 14th or at earliest 13th century) under the foundations; and recklessly jumped to the conclusion that the local Negroes had conceived and built these vast monuments! The idea of any savage people, and especially Negroes, planning such structures and undertaking the enormous labour of their construction is surely too ludicrous to be considered seriously. Even if these monuments were built no earlier than five or six centuries ago, that does not invalidate the hypothesis that they were inspired by the models of some old civilization. Is it necessary to expound the whole theory of survivals to make this point clear? The whole of this memoir is concerned with the persistence in outlying corners of the world of strange practices whose inventors passed away twenty-eight centuries and more ago, and whose country has forgotten them and their works for more than a thousand years. [My friend, W. J. Perry, is collecting other evidence which proves quite definitely that the Zimbabwe culture was “heliolithic.”] In Moll’s History (=46=) the following passage occurs in an account of the customs of Ceylon, p. 430, “when a person of condition dies his corps is laid out and wash’d, and being cover’d with a linnen-cloath, is carried out upon a bier to some high place and burnt: but if he was an officer who belong’d to the court, the corps is not burnt till the king gives orders for it, which is sometimes a great while after. In this case his friends hollow the body of a tree, and having bowell’d and embalm’d the corps, they put it in, filling the hollow up with pepper, and having made it as close as possible, they bury the corpse in some room of the house till the king orders it to be burnt.” “As for the poorer people, they usually wrap them up in mats and bury them.” This traveller’s tale would not call for serious attention if it were not confirmed by modern accounts of an analogous practice in Burma and the neighbourhood. In his “Himalayan Journal” Sir Joseph Hooker described how the Khasias temporarily embalm their dead in honey before cremating them. Pettigrew (=56=, p. 245) quotes Captain Coke’s account of the embalming of a Burman priest. The body, as witnessed by him, was lying exposed to public view upon a stage constructed of bamboos. This is the bier which is so invariably associated with mummification.