In the discussion on Flower’s memoir (=19=), Hyde Clarke justly emphasized “the importance of the demonstrations in reference to their bearings on the connection of the Australian populations with those of the main continents, and in the influence exerted in Australasia at a former time by a more highly cultivated race. This, to his mind, was the explanation of the relations of the higher culture, whether with regard to language, marriage and kindred, weapon names, or modes of culture, such as the mummies now described, the modes of incision, and form of burial. He did not consider these institutions, as some great authorities did, indigenous in Australia” (=19=, p. 394).
Corroborative evidence is now accumulating (=70=), which will definitely establish the reality of the influence thus adumbrated by Clarke 37 years ago.
Frazer (=22=, p. 80) says the burial (in Australia) on a raised stage reminds him of the “towers of silence,” and adds:—“This novelty of a raised stage can scarcely be a thing which our blacks have invented for themselves since they came to Australia; and if it is a custom which some portion of their ancestors brought with them into this country, I would argue from it that these ancestors were once in contact with, or rather formed part of, a race which had beliefs similar to those of the Persians; such beliefs are not readily adopted by strangers; they belong to a race.” Frazer proceeds to contrast this practice with the other Australian custom of desiccation, which, he says, “corresponds to the Egyptian practice of mummification” (p. 81): but, as Hertz (=33= _et supra_) has pointed out, they were inspired by the same fundamental idea, however much the present practitioners of the two methods may fail to realize this in their beliefs and traditions. The interesting suggestion emerges from these considerations that the peculiar Persian burial customs may be essentially a degraded and profoundly modified form of the ancient Egyptian funerary rites.
In his “Polynesian Researches” William Ellis (=15=) gives an interesting, though unfortunately too brief, account of the Tahitian practice of embalming. Among the poor and middle classes “methods of preservation were too expensive” to be used, but the body was “placed upon a sort of bier covered with the best native cloth” while awaiting burial (p. 399).