period when graves were not receptacles for the dead, but refuges for the living.” The idea is worked out with not a little speculative ingenuity, all manner of practices and beliefs relating to burial being tracked to this their supposed ultimate source. On the other hand, the author, as he frankly confesses, did not have access at the time of writing to a sufficiency of trustworthy documents. Now, personally, I am not convinced by any of the deductions from alleged survivals, since one and all these seem to me to be explicable in other and simpler ways. Nor, again, do I think that the direct evidence offered is really to the point. Thus the solitary fact cited in regard to pre-historic man is Lartet’s account of the Aurignac cave. But here were found the remains of no less than seventeen individuals; and it is surely most unlikely that it happened seventeen times over that a party of hunters when “trekking,” had to leave behind in the same shelter one of their number who, though alive, could not keep up with them. Besides, it happens that we have evidence going back to a still earlier period of the laying-out of the corpse after death, namely, at Le Moustier and at La Chapelle-aux-Saints. In the latter case a rectangular grave had been scooped out in the hard soil, and the head was especially protected by several long bones, on top of which lay the leg of a bison with the parts in connexion indicating a food-offering; while for the rest, the vault was so low that, in the opinion of the discoverers, the cave could hardly have been ever used as a living-place.
Nevertheless, if the author had been able to hunt up better proofs, I think he might have shown that this was one possible way, though by no means necessarily the only way, in which offerings to the dead came about. Here, for instance, is a case that seems to be relevant. “The Yerkla-mining never bury their dead or dispose of them in any way. When death approaches, the person is left alone, as comfortably as possible near a fire, and the tribe leave the neighbourhood, not to return for a considerable time” (A. W. Howitt, Nat. Tr. of S.E. Australia, 450). Or, again, we are told that by the Hottentots superannuated persons are sometimes “carried away to some cleft in the mountains, with provisions for a few days”
