[78] Domenech, Seven Years’ Residence in the Great Deserts of North America, ii. 357.
[79] Dodge, Our Wild Indians, p. 162.
[80] Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen, ii. 100 sqq. Rohde, op. cit. p. 200 sq.
[81] Pausanias, ix. 32. 9.
[82] Ibid. i. 32. 5; ix. 32. 9.
[83] Ta Tsing Leu Lee, sec. cclxxvi. p. 295.
The duties to the dead also vary according to the age, sex, and social position of the departed. Among the natives of Australia children and women are interred with but scant ceremony.[84] In the tribes of North-West-Central Queensland nobody paints his body in mourning for a young child.[85] In Eastern Central Africa the spirit of a child which dies when about four or five days of age gets nothing of the attention usually bestowed on the dead.[86] Among the Wadshagga married persons are buried in their huts, whilst the bodies of unmarried ones and especially children are put in some hidden place, where they are left to rot or be devoured by beasts.[87] Some Siberian tribes were formerly accustomed to inhume adults only, whereas the corpses of children were exposed on trees.[88] The natives of Port Jackson, in New South Wales, consigned their young people to the grave, but burned those who had passed middle age.[89] The Kondayamkottai Maravars, a Dravidian tribe of Tinnevelly in Southern India, bury the corpses of unmarried persons, whilst those of married ones are cremated.[90] In some other tribes in India burial is practised in the case of young children only,[91] and this has long been a rule of Brahmanism.[92] Among the Andaman Islanders, again, infants are buried within the encampment, whereas all other dead are carried to some distant and secluded spot in the jungle.[93] We meet with a kindred custom in the neighbourhood of Victoria Nyanza in Central Africa: in Karagwe and Nkole “children are buried in the huts themselves, grown-up people outside, generally in cultivated fields, or in such as are going to be cultivated.”[94] The bodies of women are sometimes disposed of in a different way from those of men. Thus among the Blackfeet Indians the latter were fastened in the branches of trees so high as to be beyond the reach of wolves, and then left to waste in the dry winds; whilst the body of a woman or child was thrown into the underbush or jungle, where it soon became the prey of the wild animals.[95] Among the Tuski (Chukchi), who cremate or rather boil the bodies of good men, women are not usually burned, on account of the scarcity of wood.[96]
[84] Curr, The Australian Race, i. 89.
[85] Roth, op. cit. p. 164.
[86] Macdonald, Africana, i. 59.