Note 40 — Chapter VIII · Tombs.

Lastly, to conclude this gloomy catalogue, excavations in the mounds of Ohio and Illinois40 have shown that there too cremation and inhumation are met with in sepulchres which everything tends to assign to the same race and the same period.41 The sepulchral crypts of Missouri contain several skeletons which had been subjected to intense heat. The human bones were mixed with the remains of animals, fragments of charcoal, and pieces of pottery, with sortie flint weapons. In a neighboring mound excavations revealed no trace of cremation; the bodies were stretched out upon the ground, and those who discovered them picked up near them a valuable collection of flints and of carefully made pottery. There is however nothing to show whether those who buried and those who burnt their dead belonged to the same race or lived at the same time. Cremation long survived among the most savage tribes of Alaska and California, where it is still practised, and the Indians of Florida preserve the ashes of their fathers in human skulls. In California, the relations of the deceased covered their faces with a thick paste of a kind of loam mixed with the ashes of the dead, and were compelled to wear this sign of their grief until it fell off naturally.