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Show UEN- BTJBIAL. 45 made of birds' claws inserted into one another, and several specimens of little bags, and a cap plaited out of sea- grass and almost water- tight" With the foregoing examples as illustration, the matter of embalmment may be for the present dismissed, with the advice to observers that particular care should be taken, in case mummies are discovered, to ascertain whether the bodies have been submitted to a regular preservative process, or owe their protection to ingredients in the soil of their graves or to desiccation in arid districts. UEN- ByBIAL. To close the subject of subterranean burial proper, the following account of urn- burial in Foster* may be added: " Urn- burial appears to have been practiced to some extent by the mound- builders, particularly in some of the Southern States. In the mounds on the Wateree River, near Camden, S. C, according to Dr Blanding, ranges of vases, one above the other, filled with human remains, were found. Sometimes when the mouth of the vase is small the skull is placed with the face downward in the opening, constituting a sort of cover. Entire cemeteries have been found in which urn- burial alone seems to have been practiced. Such a one was accidentally discovered not many years since in Saint Catherine's Island, on the coast of Georgia. Professor Swallow informs me that from a mound at New Madrid, Mo, he obtained a human skull inclosed in an earthen jar, the lips of which were too small to admit of its extraction. It must therefore have been molded on the head after death." " A similar mode of burial was practiced by the Chaldeans, where the funeral jars often contain a human cranium much too expanded to admit of the possibility of its passing out of it, so that either the clay must have been modeled over the corpse, and then baked, or the neck of the jar must have been added subsequently to the other rites of interment." t It is with regret that the writer feels obliged to differ from the distinguished author of the work quoted regarding urn- burial, for notwithstanding that it has been employed by some of the Central and Southern American tribes, it is not believed to have been customary1 but to a very * Pre- Historic Races, 1873, p. 19t). t Rawliuson's Herodotns, Book 1, chip. 198, note. |