HKB
of sepulture, closed at the opening so effectually against the hyaenas or other carnivora that no marks of their teeth appear on any of the bones, whether human or brute.
John Carver, in his travels in the interior of North America in a 1766-68 (chapter 15.), gave a minute account of the funeral rites of an Indian tribe which inhabited the country now called Iowa, at the junction of the St. Peter's River with the Mississippi; and Schiller, in his famous "Nadowessische Todtenklage," has faithfully embodied in a poetic dirge all the characteristic features of the ceremonies so graphically described by the English traveller, not omitting the many funeral gifts which, we are told, were placed "in a cave" with the bodies of the dead. The lines beginning, "Bringet her die letzten Gaben," have been thus translated, truthfully, and with all the spirit of the original, by Sir E. L. Bulwer*:--
"Here bring the last gifts!--and with these The last lament be said; Let all that pleased, and yet may please, Be buried with the dead.
"Beneath his head the hatchet hide, That he so stoutly swung; And place the bear's fat haunch beside-- The journey hence is long!
"And let the knife new sharpened be That on the battle-day Shore with quick strokes--he took but three-- The foeman's scalp away!
"The paints that warriors love to use, Place here within his hand, That he may shine with ruddy hues Amidst the spirit-land."
(* "Poems and Ballads of Schiller.")
If we accept M. Lartet's interpretation of the ossiferous deposits of Aurignac, both inside and outside the grotto, they add nothing to the palaeontological evidence in favour of Man's antiquity, for we have seen all the same mammalia associated elsewhere with flint implements, and some species, such as the Elephas antiquus, Rhinoceros hemitoechus, and Hippopotamus major, missing here, have been met with in other places. An argument, however, having an opposite leaning may perhaps be founded on the phenomena of Aurignac. It may--indeed it has been said, that they imply that some of the extinct mammalia survived nearly to our times:
First--Because of the modern style of the works of art at Aurignac.
Secondly--Because of the absence of any signs of change in the physical geography of the country since the cave was used for a place of sepulture.