when you visit the spot where they are buried, you only see the earth and the grass that grows thereon; and you know that after a short time the body is no longer there, but has been decomposed into its chemical elements, which rapidly escape in all directions. Your sheep and your oxen browse upon the grass that derives its luxuriance from these elements of decomposition, and you eat these animals, and assimilate the flesh, which is chiefly made up of what previously entered into the composition of your fellow-men. Such palpable cannibalism would be infinitely shocking to our feelings, and our mode of burial avoids this desecration altogether. We never think of disposing of the dead bodies of our domestic animals in any such manner. They are merely buried in the earth, where they afford sustenance to the plants, or are thrown over the reef into the ocean, where they are speedily disposed of by the sharks and other fishes which swarm around us, and no sentiment forbids us to partake of these plants and fishes as food."
I could not help remarking that the utter destruction of their mortal remains would be a grievous disappointment to future ethnologists and anthropologists, when the Colymbian race should be extinct; for that it would prevent them determining whether the extinct race was dolichocephalic or brachycephalic, a point to which the present representatives of these scientific men seemed to attach the greatest importance. He did not seem to be greatly concerned by the inevitable disappointment of these future philosophers.
Though the Colymbians are so strangely indifferent as to the final resting-place of their dead friends and relatives, and attach no sort of value to a grave, but
