.

that only that particular portion of the ground shall be set apart for the dead. Iron nails are used.* The structure is separated from the adjoining ground by digging a trench all round it, about one foot deep and wide."

It is evident from the tone of this passage that the author entirely approves of this peculiar treatment of the dead. Certain it is that the Parsis contemplate it without repulsion for themselves, and claim that it is at all events the most perfect solution of the sanitary question-which it undoubtedly is, especially in hot, yet moist, tropical climes. As a solemn reminder of the equality of all men before the laws of nature, and an efficient preventive to the vanities of funeral pomp and posthumous distinctions, the custom is also entitled to respect.

II. The attempt to carry out the exaggerated notion of the purity of the elements and the impurity of death with the most rigorous consistency, involves the priestly lawgivers in endless contradictions, places them in the most puzzling predicaments. They become conscious that so many occasions of pollution arise which are wholly beyond their control, that existence threatens to become impossible, unless they draw the line somewhere on this side of what may be termed the reduction ad absurdum of their doctrines. This they do in the form of an extra revelation, contained in a special chapter of the Vendîdâd (Fargard V.), wherein Zarathushtra is made

*Thus also the stretcher on which the dead are carried must be of iron. Metal is supposed to retain infection less than any other substance. According to the laws of purification a tainted vessel of metal can be cleansed, while one of wood cannot, but remains unclean forever and ever,

to propound nice and puzzling points, in the form of hypothetical cases, for Ahura-Mazda to solve. We give the first part of this curious dialogue whole, as a specimen :

"There dies a man in the depths of the vale: a bird takes flight from the top of the mountain down into the depths of the vale, and it eats up the corpse of the dead man there; then up it flies from the depths of the vale to the top of the mountain, it flies to some one of the trees there, of the hard-wooded or the soft-wooded, and upon that tree it vomits, it deposits dung, it drops pieces of the corpse.

"Now, lo! here is a man coming up from the depths of the vale to the top of the mountain; he comes to the tree whereon the bird is sitting, from that tree he wants to have wood for the fire. He fells the tree, he hews the tree, he splits it into logs, and then he lights it on the fire, the son of Ahura-Mazda. What is the penalty that he shall pay?"

Ahura-Mazda answered: "There is no sin upon a man for any dead matter that has been brought by dogs, birds, by wolves, by winds, or by flies.

"For, were there sin upon a man for any dead matter that might have been brought by dogs, by birds, by wolves, by winds, or by flies, how soon this material world of mine would have in it only Peshôtanus" (i. e., people guilty of death), shut out from the way of holiness, whose souls will cry and wail!" (After death, being driven away from paradise.)

In like manner the agriculturist is not to be held responsible for any dead matter that any animal may have brought into the stream that waters his field. Zarathushtra next takes Ahura-Mazda himself to task for apparent violation of his own laws :

"O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Is it true that thou, Ahura-Mazda, sendest the waters from the sea Vouru-Kasha down with the wind and with the clouds, and makest them flow down to the corpses? That thou, Ahura-Mazda, makest them flow down to the Dakhmas, to the unclean remains, to the bones? And that thou, Ahura-Mazda, makest them flow back unseen?

To which Ahura-Mazda answers: "It is even so as thou hast said, O righteous Zarathushtra!" but explains that, when the rain-water, thus polluted, returns unseen to whence it came (by evaporation), it is first cleansed in a special heavenly reservoir, called the sea PÛITIKA, from which it runs back into the sea Vouru-Kasha as pure as ever, and as fit to water the roots of the sacred trees that grow there (the Gaokerena and the tree of All-Seeds, see p. 65), and to rain down again upon the earth, to bring food to men and cattle.

12. The same inevitable inconsistency shows itself in the feeling about the Dakhmas. Although the existence of these constructions is a matter of absolute necessity, we saw above that the sites on which they are erected are numbered among those places "where the earth feels sorest grief." Nay, they are denounced, on unimpeachable hygienic grounds, as the trysting places of all the fiends-"where the troops of daêvas rush together, to kill their fifties. and their hundreds, their thousands and their tens. of thousands. . . Thus the fiends revel on there as long as the stench is rooted in the Dakhmas. Thus from the Dakhmas arise the infection of diseases, fevers, humors. . . . . . There death has most power on man from the hour when the sun is down." And, although the building of Dakhmas has at all times been considered a meritorious act of piety, we are told that the man who gladdens the earth with greatest joy is, first, "he who digs out of it most corpses of dogs and men," and, second, " he who pulls down most of those Dakhmas on which corpses of men are deposited."

"Urge every one in the material world, O Spitâma Zarathushtra!" Ahura-Mazda is made to say, to pull down Dakhmas. He who should pull down thereof, even so much as the size of his own body, his sins in thought, word, and deed are atoned for. Not for his soul shall the two spirits wage war with one another, and when he enters the blissful world, the stars, the moon, and the sun shall rejoice in him, and I, Ahura-Mazda, shall rejoice in him, saying: 'Hail, O man! thou who hast just passed from the decaying world into the undecaying one!'" (Vendîdâd, VII.)

13. And yet-such is the tyranny of circumstances not only must the earth endure the pollution of Dakhmas, and men go on building them, but there may arise even worse complications, which have to be met in some way. There is no desecration, no calamity equal to the presence or vicinity of a corpse; but men die at all seasons, and what is to be done in winter-those terribly severe winters of Central Asia-when the Dakhma, built at a more or less considerable distance from the villages, cannot be reached? Zarathushtra places the case before Ahura-Mazda, (Vendîdâd, Fargards V. and VIII.):

"O maker of the material world, thou Holy One! If in the house of a Mazdayasnian a dog or a man happens to die, and it is raining or snowing, or blowing, or the darkness is coming on, when flocks and men lose their way, what shall the Mazdayasnians do?"

Ahura-Mazda's instruction is, to choose the most sequestered and driest spot near the house, at least thirty paces from the water, the fire, and the inhabited. parts of the dwelling, and there temporarily to place the body in a grave dug half a foot in the ground if it be frozen hard, or half the height of a man if it be soft, covering the grave with dust of bricks, stones, dry earth :