Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/119

Rh testifying to some burning on the site. The third had a cavity in the floor, but only black mould within it.

What may be described as empty barrows are not unknown in other parts of the kingdom and on the continent of Europe. Several have been opened by the Rev. Canon Greenwell, who long resisted the evidence that no body or bones had been interred in them. He considered, however unlikely it might seem that these relics had disappeared, either by lapse of years or by previous rifling, that hypothesis was to be preferred to the hypothesis of a cenotaph. He was at last convinced by excavating the famous Willy Howe, where neither Lord Londesborough (who opened it in 1857) nor himself could find any human remains. "As four pieces of broken animal bone were met with among the filling-in at different places, in a perfectly sound condition, it is quite impossible," he told the Society of Antiquaries, "that the bones of a human body could have gone totally to decay. As burnt bones never appear to undergo any change, there could never have been a cremated body buried in it."

The existence of prehistoric cenotaphs having been established, their real import was obscure until the question was discussed, before the Royal Irish Academy, in an able and ingenious paper by Mr. George Coffey, now the keeper of the Museum at Dublin. This paper, which was published in the Proceedings of the Academy for 1896, establishes, by the aid of anthropological evidence, that such barrows are not merely memorials, but "in primitive logic, true tombs," erected for persons who had died at a distance, and whose bodies had not been recovered. Mr. Coffey has in fact applied to "empty" prehistoric tumuli the examples and reasoning of Mr. Frazer in his paper on "Certain Burial Customs as illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul," read to the Anthropological Institute and published in the fifteenth volume of its Journal. And he may be considered to have established the existence in the Bronze Age of a practice familiar to-day in the savage lands of both hemispheres, and of which traces are found in various parts of modern Europe, from the Balkan peninsula to the remote Irish islands of Aran and Innisboffin. Is it too much to hope that the labours of anthropologists may yet