NO MORTUARY immolation of widows obtained on the aboriginal North American northwest coast. What I propose to discuss under the above heading is what Tylor, with a too careless glance at some of the data, explained away as a mitigated survival of widow burning.1 The three peoples among whom what I shall call an incipient suttee obtained are the Carriers, the northern Kwakiutl, and the Sikanni. The practice was bound up with the practice of cremation, and as we shall show in another connection, cremation was certainly diffused to these peoples from the Tsimshian. Neither for the Tsimshian nor others of the cremating coast tribes do we have adequate data on the practices attending cremation, and to what extent the custom described for Carrier and Kwakiutl has been a borrowing from the Tsimshian can not be finally decided. But it is impossible that the Carrier and Kwakiutl independently evolved the practice, and improbable that they borrowed from each other. The common centre of distribution of the trait then may have been the Tsimshian, and presumably the practice obtained among the Tsimshian. As for the Sikanni, Harmon makes it clear that they borrowed the practice from the Carriers.