As time went on and communities became more closely united leaders must have arisen for whom the people had only affection, in whose wisdom and willingness to help they had full confidence, and who were gratefully remembered as fathers, elders, and wise in counsel, and whose return would have been gladly welcomed. This thought seems to be the foundation of the wide-spread and ancient cult or worship of ancestors. Such cases were certainly common at a somewhat later date, as in the Greek cities, where the bones of the dead leader or hero were guarded as the chief protection of the state. This feeling seems to find expression in the dolmen or house of the dead, with a carefully prepared opening in the door as if inviting the spirit to free egress. Anniversary feasts in honor of the departed were certainly common in ancient days. Close friendship and social relations were cultivated with the departed as knowledge and culture increased. The Egyptian pyramids and mummies, the graves and older dolmens, seem to testify to a very close and dependent relation between spirit and body. The spirit hovered around the body and returned to it, and where the mouldering bones lay there was the spirit's home. Its life was a very direct continuance of the life in the body. Hence also the food and libations and the rich burial gifts. But toward the close of the Neolithic period we find the great stone chamber giving place to a small cyst or vault, hardly more than a stone coffin, and entirely underground. At the same time the great stone circles seem at least to be changing from burial places to temples or centres of worship. A new method of disposal of the dead has appeared in different parts of Europe, in Brittany, for example. Up to this time the body has been of great importance; it has been scrupulously preserved, and provision made in the grave for the supply of all bodily needs, though the burial gifts have steadily diminished in number and value. Now the body is burned immediately after death, as if its preservation were no longer of any importance but a clog and hindrance from which the spirit was to be set free as soon as possible. The custom of incineration gains ground in Europe until in the Bronze Age it is the rule and inhumation the exception. The old crass materialistic view has evidently given place to a far higher and more spiritual conception of life after death, and probably also before it. We here catch a fascinating glimpse of the steady bold working and tendency of the mind of Neolithic man. It is only a glimpse of one aspect of his thought and tendency. We lack the facts to enable us to widen or deepen it. But it is enough to promise a broad field of future discoveries.