When he died the Amerind was disposed of in a number of different ways. There were burials in pits, graves, mounds, cists, caves, and so on; there was cremation; there was embalming; there was aërial sepulture in trees or scaffolds; there was burial beneath water, or in canoes that were turned adrift. The Navajos leave the dead in the place where they die, or throw them into a cleft in the rocks and pile stones upon the corpse. In Tennessee graves are found which were made by lining a rectangular excavation with slabs of stone. These are ancient and resemble the graves of the reindeer period in France. Yarrow[348] speaks of them as being almost identical. I found graves of similar description in southern Utah near the Arizona line, but in the two or three that I opened there were no bones, only on the bottom a shallow layer of what appeared to be fine dark earth with thin slabs upon it; doubtless the slabs once forming the top.[349] Some tribes wrapped their dead in fine furs or in grasses and matting;[350] others buried in urns. In the North-west a living slave was buried with the deceased. If the slave were not dead in three days, he was strangled by another slave. In Mexico the custom of burying slaves with the dead was common. [Illustration: MODERN LACED SANDAL OF LEATHER FROM COLIMA, MEXICO] [Illustration: ESKIMO PIPE WITH STONE BOWL.] CHAPTER XIV MYTHS, TRADITIONS, AND LEGENDS Persons who are obliged to rely on memory find that memory develops with use and becomes more reliable. The Amerinds, having no written language, if we except the Nahuatl and Mayan tribes, had no way of preserving their tales, traditions, and legends except to remember them, and there can be no doubt that everywhere on the continent memory was highly developed. To assist in recalling them they had their picture-writing, already described. The method is well illustrated in the remarkable _Walam Olum_, or Red Score of the Lenapé, where a most poetic account of the origin of things is recorded by means of a few rude pictures made by lines and dots.[351] There has been some doubt as to the genuineness of this score, first recorded by Rafinesque, but Brinton, who was a scholar of fine intellect and calm judgment and thoroughly versed in all the intricacies of the situation, accepted it as a genuine Amerind production “which was repeated orally to someone indifferently conversant with the Delaware language, who wrote it down to the best of his ability. In its present form it can, as a whole, lay no claim either to antiquity, or to purity of linguistic form. Yet, as an authentic modern version, slightly coloured by European teachings, of the ancient tribal traditions, it is well worth preservation.... The narrator was probably one of the native chiefs or priests, who had spent his life in the Ohio and Indiana towns of the Lenapé, and who, though with some knowledge of Christian instruction,