Lexington gazette. [volume] (Lexington, Va.) 1871-1962, 1908-12-09
ANTIQUITY or THE COFFIN.
Probably q Survival Of the Mummy
Case or the Dolmen.

Oaso " tDe OOtUieH.
The shapes of familiar objects Of
human manufacture do not as a
rule excite our curiosity. The box
like form of coffin, for instance,
suggests nothing. Even an under
taker has no views on the raison
d'etre of collins save that they con-
duce to decency. Yet on grounds
of propriety many nations, such as
the ancient Romans and the Hin
docs, have preferred cremation to
interment, since the latter involves
the Disagreement and gradual de-
cay of the dead.
Collins indeed are not explainable
on grounds Of hygiene or seemli-
ness, for which primitive men cared
very little. Rather must we see in
the modern wooden coffin a copy of
the prehistoric stone or chalk re-
ceptacle which was a conventional
reproduction of one of two things
the mummy cases familiar to stu
dents of Egyptology or the dolmen
Tor stone house, in which prehis-
toric non-Ayran races, especially
around the Mediterranean from
Egypt westward, were in the habit
Of burying their dead.
Collins were, as Lord Avebury
points out in his prehistoric
Tr ;" apparently unknown to
very ancient man. The dead were
buried in sitting posture or in the
attitude of sleep in what were re-
garded as a kind of ghost houses.
The most elaborate and fully differ
entiated of these houses of the dead
are, as Professor Sergi maintains,
the pyramids, with their mummies
and various precautions against the
decay of the body.
A less elaborate differentiation Of
the house idea is to be found in the
dolmens still remaining all over the
world from India to Great Britain.
A dolmen, built of five slabs Of
stone, covered by tumulus, crown
ed by menhir, surrounded by a
stone circle, as at Stonehenge and
Avebury, and led up to by an ave-
nue. of standing stones, is, in fact, a
rude adumbration of the pyramid.
Inside the dolmen the dead sat |
crouched among cooking utensils,
arms, etc., put there for their use
in the spirit world. Is it too much |
to suppose that the earliest stone |
collins we're limitations of the dol |
mens-in fact, dolmens in minia-
ture?
Whether this be SO or not. it is |
very probable that our old fashion
ed standing tombstones, and eSpe-
cially our table tombs (which are
five sided), as we'll as the family |
vaults Of great families, with their
traditions of embalmment and their
leaden shell collins, which conyen-
tionally outline the shapes of the
dead within, are SO many relics of
the remote epoch when a tomb was
conceived of as a house in which
the dead continue to live their for
neg lives.
The leaden shell collins just men
toned may indeed have originated
the modern coffin. The latter was
'tih, for no apparently sufficient
reason, to be constructed in ac-
,ordance with careful measure-
nents and in conventional imitation
If the human shape. The leaden
hell in the family vault sometimes
yoes so far as conventionally to pre-
erve the outline of the fingers of
he corpse, and this fact would seem {
@ point back to a time when
'orpses were not confined. Thus
he shell, and afterward the coffin l
II elaborated shell, might be re- /
,arded as interpretations in the dol
nen scheme of burial. - London
Iancet. c