Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/830

808 hand with, an arrow. Furthermore, the undertakers or managers of the royal funeral had to furnish a woman, a cup-bearer, a cook, a waiter, a messenger, and a certain number of horses; all to be killed. In fact, in the particular king's funeral which the great Greek historian is describing they took the king's ministers, fifty in number, and strangled them. Then, having killed fifty of the chief horses of the king, they prepared them and set them in a circle, upon each one a strangled rider, that they might serve as a royal guard to the dead hero." "The chiefs of the Fiji Islands have from fifty to one hundred wives, according to their rank. At the interment of a principal chief the body is laid in state upon a spacious lawn in the presence of an immense concourse of spectators. The principal wife, after the utmost ingenuity of the natives has been exercised in adorning her person, then walks out and takes her seat near the body of her husband. A rope is passed round her neck, which eight or ten powerful men pull, until she is strangled and dies. Her body is then laid by that of the chief. In this manner four wives are sacrificed, and all of them are interred in a common grave, one above, one below, and one on either side of the husband. This is done that the spirit of the chief be not lonely in its passage to the invisible world, and that, by such an offering, its happiness may be at once secured." It may be added to this that, in certain lauds, the custom is to inter alive the attendants of the dead chieftain; it being believed that this precaution adds to the solemnity of the occasion and to the future happiness of the departed. In ancient Mexico this practice of sacrificing upon the occasion of a funeral was carried on with great pomp and lavish effusion of blood, in some cases a hundred persons being slain to act as guides and servitors to the deceased chief in his journey to the other world. In India, owing to the kindly offices of the British Government, the terrible suttee has entirely disappeared. This, it is needless to say, was the custom of self-sacrifice by the wife of the dead husband. It is impossible not to admire the heroic spirit of those Hindoo widows who deemed it a high honor to cast themselves upon the funeral pyre of their spouse. "Indeed, when the female slaves find their mistress is greatly afflicted at the loss of her husband, they promise her, in case she is resolved not to survive him, to burn themselves along with her, and are always as good as their word. They dance near the funeral pyre, and throw themselves into it, one after another."

The two other modes of sepulture are, as has been said, embalming and cremation. Embalming was not unknown among the ancient Hebrews: there is frequent allusion in the later Scriptures, and especially in the New Testament, to the embalming of the body in antiseptics and fragrant substances. But the land