674 ^^^ POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



on his feet in a niche left in the walls of bones, several feet thick, 

 which ornament the rooms. The niches being also always full, they 

 are obliged to make room here, too, for the new-comer by breaking up 

 and scraping the skeleton which has stood there longest, and adding 

 his bones to the different arches and festoons which are gracefully dis- 

 tributed on all sides. The convent is not very full just now, so that 

 the poor fellows rest on the average seven or eight years in their graves; 

 formerly they were often dug up in two or three." 



The earth affording this limited privilege is said to have been ori- 

 ginally brought from Jerusalem, so that quarters in it were regarded 

 as peculiarly desirable by the originators of the custom just described; 

 but no doubt an equally important reason for establishing the practice 

 was the desire to edify the living monks by the exhibition of the re- 

 mains of their predecessors. Heretic sight-seers had not then begun 

 to invade the city. If, however, the possibility of their visits had been 

 foreseen, it might well have been supposed that the silent warnings of 

 the dead might be more effective in their conversion than the argu- 

 ments of living preachers. 



It will hardly be thought that any mere secular sermon may also 

 be preached upon the text furnished by this assemblage of bones. But 

 we have here one solution of the problem, so much discussed in our 

 times, of discovering the proper method for the disposal of dead bodies. 

 We need not allow the various offensive circumstances connected with 

 these Capuchin interments to conceal the main principle upon which 

 they are conducted. The corpses are left to rest some years, without 

 coffins, in dry, sheltered earth, before any step is taken toward their 

 tinal disposition. If we consider these facts alone, we shall have no 

 difficulty in perceiving that the chief objections to our common funeral 

 usages, and to those substitutes for them which are most frequently 

 suggested, have been met in advance by the Capuchins. The cellar, 

 the standing skeletons, and the festoons of bones are not essential fea- 

 tures of the method of interment which they have adopted. 



What, in fact, are the causes which have brought coffins for the 

 dead, with all their disagreeable and dangerous consequences, into such 

 general use ? Undoubtedly, our natural wishes that the bodies of our 

 friends should be protected, and not left exposed to accident or vio- 

 lence of any kind. Interments without coffins in open cemeteries will 

 hardly be acceptable to civilized people, however much from a sanitary 

 point of view they may be preferable to the customary method. It 

 is needless to engage in a discussion of the repulsive incidents which 

 must or may attend either the use or the abandonment of coffins. We 

 have had them unpleasantly set forth time and again, and may assume 

 at once that all of them are, if possible, to be avoided. The ground 

 ought not to be poisoned either more or less ; and we have not room 

 for so wide a separation of one corpse from another as to make our in- 

 terments quite harmless. 



