Then jars of honey, and of fragrant oil, Suspends around, low-bending o'er the pile. Pour forth their lives, and on the pyre are thrown. On these the rage of fire victorious preys, Involves and joins them in one common blaze."* During the ceremony, decursions and games were celebrated, often lasting several days, after which the ossilegium, or gathering of the bones and ashes of the dead, washing, anointing, and depositing in urns, was performed. Amongst refined and civilized peoples it is possible to conceive that a certain sacredness was connected with this ceremonial, and that such lines as the Salve Eternum might form an appropriate conclusion of such service : "Farewell, O soul departed! Loved urn and thou solemn cell, Mute ashes!-farewell, farewell! But the incremation ceremony in western and northern Europe was in reality more an occasion of feasting; the slain animals being chiefly cooked and eaten by the mourners. Thus we find in AngloSaxon barrows and graves in England abundant remains of animals, especially those of the horse, which have served as feasts. To so high a pitch had this practice of the lyke-wake risen in later times that it was severely denounced in numerous inhibitions issued by the early Church.‡ Judging by the number of instances in which gold ornaments have been found in graves, it seems probable that gold was the metal which first attracted the attention of man. Its bright colour would certainly attract even the rudest savages, who are known to be very fond of personal decoration. Silver does not appear to have been discovered until long after gold, and was apparently preceded by both copper and tin, as it is rarely, if ever, found in tumuli of the Bronze age; but however this may be, copper seems to have been the metal which first became of real importance to man; no doubt owing to the fact that its ores * Pope's Translation of the 'Iliad,' Book xxiii. + Last Days of Pompeii:' Lytton. See Rolleston in 'Archæologia,' vol. xlii. VOL. VII. 2 B are abundant in many countries, and can be smelted without difficulty; and that, while iron is hardly ever found except in the form of ore, copper often occurs in a native condition and can be beaten at once into shape. * There is no reason to suppose that the mound-builders, whose earth-works occupy leagues in extent in the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio, were acquainted with the art of smelting copper; that they mined it extensively on the shores of Lake Superior, and wrought it into knives, spear-heads, chisels, and bracelets, and other personal ornaments there can be no reasonable doubt, but having no tin, they could not, like the ancient dwellers of the Swiss lakes, Denmark, &c., impart to the alloy almost the hardness of steel. It is doubtful, even, whether their metallurgic art extended to the smelting of copper; for it often happens that the native copper of Lake Superior encloses native silver, both metals existing side by side chemically pure, which, if smelted, in whatever proportions, would form a homogeneous compound. Bracelets have been found in the mounds, in which this peculiarity is preserved, thus showing that the material had not been smelted but simply hammered cold; and the ends are brought together by bending, without any evidence of having been soldered.† Of the amount of gold found in the Chiriqui graves in Central America probably no just estimate can be obtained. At the period of Mr. Power's visit in August, 1859, about 250 lbs. weight of gold had been extracted from the huacas at Bugábita, two-thirds being tolerably pure gold, the remaining third what is called "guanin, or gold alloyed with copper; the value of the whole was about 12,5007. In the summer of 1861, some fresh tombs were discovered from which gold objects to the value of 16,0007. had been extracted.‡ Although, as must necessarily happen, these interesting remains find their fate in the melting-pot wholesale, there are yet to be seen in the Blackmore Museum at Salisbury, the Christy Museum, Victoria Street, the British Museum, and elsewhere, many examples of these curious American antiquities. From a careful examination of many of the Ohio mounds and a comparison of their characteristics with ancient Scandinavian tumuli, it seems highly probable that, in some instances at least, the tomb was formed by covering the dwelling in which the dead man had lived with a mound of earth or a cairn of stones. This would explain the curious sorted condition of many remains in the American mounds. Thus in mound No. 8, "Mound City," may have been buried the body of some celebrated pipe-maker, with all his stock-in-trade, which his friends no doubt believed he would *Lubbock, Pre-historic Times,' pp. 3-4. find valuable to him for barter in the land of spirits as he had done in this world. In others the stock of arrow-heads was so enormous we may well suppose the occupier of the mound had been a maker of flint arrow-heads. The practices of modern savages often throw great light upon these difficult points. * Thus we find among the New Zealanders, if the owner dies, he is commonly buried in his house with all it contained. The islanders of Torres Straits also used their dwelling-huts as dead-houses.† It is still more significant that the Esquimaux themselves frequently leave the dead in the houses which they occupied when alive.‡ We cannot, says Sir John Lubbock, compare the plan of a Scandinavian "passage-grave" with that of an Esquimaux snow-house, without being struck with the great similarity existing between them. Under these circumstances there seems much probability in the view advocated by Professor Nilsson, the venerable archæologist of Sweden, that these "passage-graves" are a copy or adaptation of the dwelling-house; that the ancient inhabitants of Scandinavia, unable to imagine a future altogether different from the present, or a world quite unlike our own, showed their respect and affection for the dead by burying with them those things which in life they had valued most; with women their ornaments, with warriors their weapons. They buried the house with its owner, and the grave was literally the dwelling of the dead.§ From the foregoing premises we may venture to establish this axiom, namely, that any people who accompanied the rites of interment of their dead by such evident indications of care and attention as we find in a vast number of graves belonging to different periods and races in Western Europe and America, may be safely concluded to have possessed a notion of a future state, whatever may have been the name they ascribed to it; and moreover they must have also believed it possible, by their gifts and good offices, to assist their departed friends into the spirit land. * Tylor, New Zealand and its Inhabitants,' p. 101. Ross Arctic Expedition,' 1829-33, p. 290. § Lubbock, Pre-historic Times,' pp. 126–7. VI. FOREIGN TREES AND PLANTS FOR ENGLISH GARDENS.* By ALFRED W. BENNETT, M.A., B.Sc., F.L.S. THE introduction of new forms of vegetable life into our gardens and greenhouses has made considerable progress during recent years. The Acclimatisation Societies of Paris and London have, it is true, paid more attention to the domestication of foreign animals than of plants; something, however, has been attempted in this direction, and with considerable success. This branch of acclimatisation would, indeed, seem likely to be the most fertile in results beneficial to mankind. For one fresh animal introduced that will be of real utility, there will probably be a dozen plants that yield important economical products. The early races of mankind appear to have exhausted our powers over the lower animals-the horse, the ass, the dog, the camel, the ox, the sheep, were all brought under subjection to man at the earliest period of his history; and within historic times no important addition has been made to the number of our domestic animals. Not so with plants. A large number of the vegetable substances used as food at the present day, and of the vegetable articles of manufacture, were unknown to the ancients; and the field for further extension of our utilisation of the vegetable kingdom seems indefinitely large. The power of cultivation in modifying plants is also much greater than any corresponding power of domestication in modifying animals. The oldest extant drawings of the horse, the ox, or the camel, scarcely point out any distinctive features from their descendants now living; the potato and the apple, on the other hand, may almost be considered as manufactured products; while many gardeners' flowers, such as the Pelargonium and the Tulip, differ so widely from their ancestors as, in some cases, to obscure their parentage. The term Acclimatisation has been objected to by some scientific men, on the ground that the descendants of any animal or plant which has been transported from one climate to another have no more power than their ancestor of adapting themselves to that climate, unless the principle of Natural Selection has come into play to eliminate the individuals least able to adapt themselves to the new climate, those only surviving which, from some cause or other, are most suited to the fresh conditions. Be this as it may, there is no question about the fact that the farmer *The Planter's Guide: Trees and Shrubs for English Plantations.' By A. Mongredien. London: J. Murray. 1870. 'Alpine Flowers for English Gardens.' By W. Robinson, F.L.S. London: J. Murray. 1870. 'Dendrologie: Bäume, Sträucher, und Halb-sträucher welche in Mittel oder Nord-Europa im Freien kultivirt werden.' Kritisch bearbeitet von Karl Koch. Erster Theil. Erlangen. Enke, 1869. and the gardener have it in their power to naturalise plants foreign to our climate and our soil. But the conditions of this naturalisation are by no means so simple as might at first sight appear. It might naturally be supposed that all we have to do is to introduce those plants which grow spontaneously in a climate and a soil similar to our own, and that they will necessarily flourish, and will scarcely be aware of the change. Or, if they come from a warmer country, that all that is needed is to protect them by glass and artificial warmth from the inclemency of our winters. But in practice this is not found to be the case. A plant will frequently obstinately refuse to become naturalised in a country, the climatal and geological conditions of which are similar to those that occur in the region where it is indigenous. Our common daisy, a native of almost every country of Europe, is said to have resisted all attempts to introduce it even into the gardens of the United States. Some plants seem to have an unconquerable aversion to the fostering hand of man, even in their own country. A wellconstructed and carefully-kept fernery will contain specimens, more or less luxuriant, of nearly all our native ferns; the polypody and hartstongue from shady banks and tree-stumps; the so-called male and female ferns from the woods; the spleenwort from dry walls; even the royal "flowering-fern" from bogs; and some of the semialpine species will flourish with the exercise of a little care. One kind, however, is almost invariably absent, and that the most widely distributed of all our ferns, the common brake, a native of every county and almost of every parish in the country, but which can seldom be induced to remain a denizen of soil that has once been brought under man's dominion. On the other hand, some of the greatest favourites of our gardens, which display no coyness whatever in overrunning our flower-beds, are natives of countries where the climate presents very different features to our own, or of very limited tracts of our own country, to which they seem strictly confined by impassable barriers of soil or meteorological conditions. To take instances of the latter phenomenon:-There is no garden flower more cosmopolitan in its tastes, more certain to thrive under any conditions of light or heavy soil, sun or shade, care or neglect, even in the heart of a town, as its very name seems to indicate, than the London Pride. Yet the Saxifraga umbrosa is one of the most restricted in distribution of our native plants. Abundant enough where it does grow, it is yet entirely confined to the moist equable climate of the hilly country in the south-west of Ireland and a few other similar localities, beyond which it is never found in the wild state. Botanists will think themselves amply repaid for a toilsome day's march by gathering the beautiful Polemonium cæruleum in its native habitat among the calcareous hills of the west of Yorkshire; yet the Jacob's Ladder is an ornament of every garden on the very |