Page:Eskimo Life.djvu/281

floor, to swathe them in their grave-clothes. This lowering them down from the bed probably symbolises their wish that after death they may descend beneath the earth. But if a man dies before he is taken from the bed, his soul goes upward.' On his inquiring why a dog's head was laid beside the grave, he was answered 'that it was a custom among some of their fellows to lay a dog's head beside a child when it was buried, in order that it might scent about and guide the child to the land of spirits when it came to life again, children being foolish and witless, and unable to find their own way.'^[1] It seems as though Captain Holm^[2] doubted the correctness of this trait (which, however, he quotes from Hans Egede), on the ground that he could discover no such poetical custom among the East Greenlanders. But in this he does not seem to be quite justified; for, on the one hand, we are scarcely entitled to doubt so definite a statement by a man like Paul Egede, who knew the Greenlanders and their language so well, while, on the other hand, we must always remember how fluctuating and changeable are religious conceptions. Analogous customs, moreover, are found among the Indians. The Aztecs killed a dog at

1. P. Egede, Efterretninger om Grönland, p. 109. See also H. Egede, Det gamle Grönlands nye Perlustration, p. 84. Cranz, Historie von Grönland, p. 301.
2. Meddelelser om Grönland, part 10, p. 106, note.