wide
enough for the purpose close at hand. The missionary who records the
fact could not learn the reason of it.[729] The custom of taking the
dead out of the house by a special opening, which is afterwards closed
up, has not been confined to Fiji; on the contrary it has been practised
by a multitude of peoples, savage, barbarous, and civilised, in many
parts of the world. For example, it was an old Norse rule that a corpse
might not be carried out of the house by the door which was used by the
living; hence a hole was made in the wall at the back of the dead man's
head and he was taken out through it backwards, or a hole was dug in the
ground under the south wall and the body was drawn out through it.[730]
The custom may have been at one time common to all the Aryan or
Indo-european peoples, for it is mentioned in other of their ancient
records and has been observed by widely separated branches of that great
family down to modern times. Thus, the Zend-Avesta prescribes that, when
a death has occurred, a breach shall be made in the wall and the corpse
carried out through it by two men, who have first stripped off their
clothes.[731] In Russia "the corpse was often carried out of the house
through a window, or through a hole made for the purpose, and the custom
is still kept up in many parts."[732] Speaking of the Hindoos a French
traveller of the eighteenth century says that "instead of carrying the
corpse out by the door they make an opening in the wall by which they
pass it out in a seated posture, and the hole is closed up after the
ceremony."[733] Among various Hindoo castes it is still customary, when
a death has occurred on an inauspicious day, to remove the corpse from
the house not through the door, but through a temporary hole made in the
wall.[734] Old German law required that the corpses of criminals and
suicides should be carried out through a hole under the threshold.[735]
In the Highlands of Scotland the bodies of suicides were not taken out
of the house for burial by the doors, but through an opening made
between the wall and the thatch.[736]

[Sidenote: Examples of the custom among non-Aryan peoples.]

But widespread as such customs have been among Indo-european peoples,
they have been by no means confined to that branch of the human race. It
was an ancient Chinese practice to knock down part of the wall of a
house for the purpose of carrying out a corpse.[737] Some of the
Canadian Indians would never t