Note 1 — Chapter LVIII

Ralston remarks (Songs of the Russian people, p. 327.) “The fact that in Slavonic lands, a thousand years ago, widows used to destroy themselves, in order to accompany their dead husbands to the world of spirits, seems to rest upon incontestable evidence, and there can be no doubt that ‘a rite of suttee, like that of modern India’ prevailed among the heathen Slavonians, the descendant, perhaps as Mr. Tylor remarks (Primitive Culture, I, 421) of ‘widow-sacrifice’ among many of the European nations, of ‘an ancient Aryan rite belonging originally to a period even earlier then the Veda’”. See also Zimmer, Alt-Indisches Leben, pp. 329–331.