Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/479

Rh of the buried warrior in the land of spirits. Hence the last and best service that could be performed for a deceased relative was to take an enemy's life, and thus transmit it by his scalp. The correspondence of this idea with that just mentioned among the Dayaks is very striking. With a similar intention, the Caribs would slay on the dead master's grave any of his slaves they could lay hands on. Among the native peoples risen to considerably higher grades of social and political life, these practices were not suppressed but exaggerated, in the ghastly sacrifices of warriors, slaves, and wives, who departed to continue their duteous offices at the funeral of the chief or monarch in Central America and Mexico, in Bogota and Peru. It is interesting to notice, in somewhat favourable contrast with these customs of comparatively cultured American nations, the practice of certain rude tribes of the North-West. The Quakeolths, for instance, did not actually sacrifice the widow, but they made her rest her head on her husband's corpse while it was being burned, until at last she was dragged more dead than alive from the flames; if she recovered, she collected her husband's ashes and carried them about with her for three years, during which any levity or deficiency of grief would render her an outcast. This looks like a mitigated survival from an earlier custom of actual widow-burning.

Of such funeral rites, carried out to the death, graphic