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.



URN-BURIAL.


To close the subject of subterranean burial proper, the following
account of urn-burial in Foster [Footnote: Pre-Historic Races, 1873,
p. 199] 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