Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/207

Rh John Carver, in his travels in the interior of North America in 1766–68 (ch. xv.), 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 Graben,' 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.'

If we accept M. Lartet's interpretation of the ossiferous deposits of Aurignac, both inside and outside the grotto, they add nothing to the palæontological 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 hemitœchus, and Hippopotamus major, missing here, have been met with in