BURIAL, a word of Teut. origin (Ang.-Sax. birgan, to conceal), is applied to the prev alent method among civilized nations of disposing of the dettd, by hiding them in the earth. As there is almost nothing else so deeply interesting to the living as the disposal of those whom they have loved and lost, so there is perhaps nothing else so distinctive of the condition and character of a people as the method in which they treat their dead. Hence, funeral customs associate themselves with a wide variety of sentiments, from gentle and rational sorrow, up to deification of the departed, accompanied sometimes with cruelty and ferocity towards the living. People of a low and barbarous type care lessly permit the remains of the dead to lie in the way of the living, and there are a few instances in which the object of artificial arrangements has been to preserve a decorated portion of the body—as, for instance, a gilded skull—among survivors. The general tendency of mankind, however. has always been to bury the dead out of sight of the living; and various as the methods of accomplishing this end have been, they have resolved themselves into three great classifications: 1. The simple closing up of the body in earth or stone; 2. The burning of the body, and the entombing of the cinders; and, 3. The embalming- of the body. The first of these seems to be the earliest form of which we have any record, and it is the form most amply sanctioned by the existing practice of the civilized world. It is the method referred to in the earliest scriptures; and all are familiar with the touching scene. in which Abraham buries Sarah in the cave in the land of Canaan which belonged to Epbron, but was, after a solemn and courteous negotiation, secured to Abraham for a possession to bury his dead in (Gen. e. 23). The horrible fate of being left unburied, either from scorn or neglect, is powerfully told in the prophecy of Jeremiah against .Tehoiakitn: " He shall be buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem." 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; and the burning of the bodies of Saul and his sons is accounted for by commentators on the supposition that they were too far decayed to be embalmed. The Israelites may have learned the practice of embalming from the Egyptians, among whom it was an art so greatly cultivated and extensively practiced, that Egyptian corpses, as inoffensive as any article of wood or stone, are scattered over Europe in museums, and are even to be found as curiosities in private houses. The soil and 'Climate of upper Egypt seem to have afforded facilities for embalming unmatched in any other part of the world; and in other places the vestiges of the practice are comparatively rare, though it is usual even yet to embalm royal corpses, and in some places to preserve a series of mummies, as in the vault of the mon astery of Kreuzberg, at Bonn. where the monks have been successively preserved in
their costume for centuries. The practice of incremation, or of the burning of the body, and the entombing of the ashes, deserves more inquiry than it has yet obtained. In Greece, in Etruria—both before and after it came under the Romans—aud in the n. of Europe, the simple burial of the body, and its prior reduction to ashes, were both prac ticed, and sometimes contemporaneously. The tombs of Etruria are rich in art, much of it going to the adornment of the urns of baked clay in which the ashes of the dead are kept. Vessel of or cooked earth, containing human remains, have been found, often so large that they appear to have 'served as coffins for containing the whole body. Vessels of this kind were found in the valley of the Scamander by some British officers while spending their leisure time after the siege of Sebastopol, upon the ground supposed to have been occupied by the besiegers of Troy. Smaller cinerary urns have been found over so extensive a portion of the world, that it is difficult to define the limits to which they belong. The Danish antiquaries say, that in their stone period, when the use of metals was unknown, the dead were all buried unburned in stone chambers, and that the burning of the bodies and the preservation of the ashes in urns came in with the age of bronze. These antiquaries associate with the older system those amorphous mounds of earth or stone called barrows or tumuli, which are to be found all over the n. of Europe. Mr. Bremner, in traveling among the steppes of the Ukraine, saw multitudes of these small mounds, which reminded him at once of what be had seen on the plain of Troy, at Upsala in Sweden, in Scotland, and in Ireland. The Irish tumulus of New Grange is perhaps the most remarkable of all, forming a connecting link between the simple barrow on the moor and the pyramids of Egypt, which are the perfection of the same kind of structure applied to the same purpose— the burial of the distinguished dead. These structures open up a large field of curious inquiry. The simple theory, that they were raised over the dead, has lately been dis turbed by the discovery that many of them are not artificial, but relics of sheets of alluvial matter, the mass of .which has been carried away; and even in these, human remains have been found, the natural mounds having been used as monuments. Even when human remains are connected with barrows, cromlechs, or the large shape less pillars commonly called Druidical, it is often questionable whether the monu ment was made to receive such remains. It is certainly ascertained to have been a practice in ancient times to bury bodies in tombs •which were themselves ancient when they received their inmates.