We opened the Ogbury round barrow at the same time as the other, and found in it, as we expected, no bones or skeleton of any sort, broken or otherwise, but simply a large cinerary urn.  The urn was formed of coarse hand-made earthenware, very brittle by long burial in the earth, but not by any means so old or porous as the fragments we had discovered in the long barrow.  A pretty pattern ran round its edge—­a pattern in the simplest and most primitive style of ornamentation; for it consisted merely of the print of the potter’s thumb-nail, firmly pressed into the moist clay before baking.  Beside the urn lay a second specimen of early pottery, one of those curious perforated jars which antiquaries call by the very question-begging name of incense-cups; and within it we discovered the most precious part of all our ‘find,’ a beautiful wedge-shaped bronze hatchet, and three thin gold beads.  Having no consideration for the feelings of the ashes, we promptly appropriated both hatchet and beads, and took the urn and cup as a peace-offering to the lord of the manor for our desecration of a tomb (with his full consent) on the land of his fathers.

Why did these bronze-age people burn instead of burying their dead?  Why did they anticipate the latest fashionable mode of disposal of corpses, and go in for cremation with such thorough conviction?  They couldn’t have been influenced by those rather unpleasant sanitary considerations which so profoundly agitated the mind of ‘Graveyard Walker.’  Sanitation was still in a very rudimentary state in the year five thousand B.C.; and the ingenious Celt, who is still given to ‘waking’ his neighbours, when they die of small-pox, with a sublime indifference to the chances of infection, must have had some other and more powerful reason for adopting the comparatively unnatural system of cremation in preference to that of simple burial.  The change, I believe, was due to a further development of religious ideas on the part of the Celtic tribesmen above that of the primitive stone-age cannibals.

When men began to bury their dead, they did so in the firm belief in another life, which life was regarded as the exact counterpart of this present one.  The unsophisticated savage, holding that in that equal sky his faithful dog would bear him company, naturally enough had the dog in question killed and buried with him, in order that it might follow him to the happy hunting-grounds.  Clearly, you can’t hunt without your arrows and your tomahawk; so the flint weapons and the trusty bow accompanied their owner in his new dwelling-place.  The wooden haft, the deer-sinew bow-string, the perishable articles of food and drink have long since decayed within the damp tumulus:  but the harder stone and earthenware articles have survived till now, to tell the story of that crude and simple early faith.  Very crude and illogical indeed it was, however, for it is quite clear that the actual body of the dead man was thought