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CREMATION. 



CREMATION". Cremation, or the burning 

 of the dead, has been practised among many 

 nations, and from very early times. The relics 

 of the Bronze age in Great Britain and Den- 

 mark show that it was usual in that period, 

 and its prevalence among the ancient Britons 

 is known from history. It was practised from 

 a very ancient date among several other West- 

 era nations, and among the people of Eastern 

 Asia. It was general among the ancient 

 Greeks, and must have been adopted by them 

 at a very remote period. Numerous instances 

 of cremation are described in Homer's poems 

 and in Virgil's "^Eneid," as occurring about the 

 time of the Trojan War. Cremation was bor- 

 rowed by the Romans from the Greeks, and 

 was not generally practised among them till 

 toward the end of the republic. The custom 

 gradually went into disuse under the empire, 

 and appears to have been abandoned about the 

 end of the fourth century. There is no rec- 

 ord that it was ever practised by any Christian 

 nation. Cremation still prevails among many 

 of the nations of Eastern Asia. In India, un- 

 til recently, the living widow was burned upon 

 the pyre with the body of her deceased husband. 



Cremation, with the ancient Greeks and 

 Romans, was performed upon a pile of wood, 

 or funeral-pyre, built in the form of an altar 

 in the open air, and with elaborate ceremonies, 

 and the offering of gifts and sacrifices, strong 

 perfumes being added to neutralize the odors. 

 After the process was completed, the ashes 

 were gathered up and carefully deposited in 

 urns. A proposal was made during the French 

 Revolution to revive the practice, but it was 

 never adopted. 



Within a few years new attempts have been 

 made to commend cremation. Several plans 

 have been devised for consuming corpses in 

 furnaces specially made for the purpose, or in 

 close retorts. Prof. H. C. Richter described 

 one in the Gartenlaube of Leipsic, in 1856. 

 More recently Polli and Clericetti invented an 

 apparatus, by means of which the body of 

 Baron von Keller was burned at Milan. Pro- 

 cesses suggested by Friedrich Siemens and Prof. 

 Reclam, of Breslau, have been tested experi- 

 mentally with satisfactory results. Dr. L. 

 Brunetti, Professor of Pathology in the Uni- 

 versity of Padua, exhibited, at the Vienna Ex- 

 position of 1873, the residue from bodies and 

 parts of bodies on which he had practised 

 cremation by various methods. He had found, 

 by his latest experiments, that the whole pro- 

 cess of incineration of an adult human body 

 occupied three and a half hours. The result- 

 ant ashes and bone-earth weighed 1.70 kilo- 

 gramme, or about three pounds and three- 

 quarters avoirdupois. The quantity of wood 

 required to insure a perfect process was about 

 one hundred and fifty pounds, and cost one 

 florin and twenty kreutzers, or about two shil- 

 lings and fourpence English. Other apparatus 

 have been invented by William Siemens and 

 Engineer Steinmann, of Leipsic. 



The attention of the English and American 

 people was directed to cremation by means of 

 an article advocating it, published by Sir Henry 

 Thompson, in the Contemporary Review for 

 January, 1877. This writer argued in favor 

 of burning in preference to burial on grounds 

 of utility and economy, and of sentiment. 

 He held it to be desirable to expedite the de- 

 composing process of Nature, and render it 

 inoffensive, and to return speedily the elements 

 into which the body is resolved to their des- 

 tined function of furnishing food to plants. 

 These processes, he represented, are retarded 

 by burial ; the ground is made noxious during 

 the process of decomposition, wells are liable 

 to be poisoned, and the health, particularly of 

 crowded districts, is endangered. He referred 

 to the economical aspect of the question in the 

 light of the value of the organic remains, as 

 manure. All of this, he held, was lost to ag- 

 riculture for an unreasonably long period by 

 the present method of disposing of dead bod- 

 ies. On the other hand, by cremation in a 

 properly-constructed furnace, the gases of the 

 body would be driven off without offensive 

 odor, and would ere night be consumed by 

 plants and trees, while the mineral constitu- 

 ents the bones and ashes would remain in a 

 crucible, and could be preserved in a funeral 

 urn, or scattered in the fields. No scents or 

 balsams would be required, as in the ancient 

 open-air burnings, to neutralize odors. Re- 

 garding sentiment, Sir Henry referred to the 

 repulsive appearance assumed by bodies during 

 decay, and to the horrors of being buried 

 alive, both of which would be avoided by a 

 thoroughly-conducted process of burning. He 

 assumed that cremation is as susceptible as 

 burial of association with religious funeral 

 rites, that it affords escape from unpleasant 

 ceremonials connected with burial, and equally 

 permits the preservation of concrete remains 

 and the erection of a shrine of affection. The 

 body of Lady Dilke, an Englishwoman, was 

 burned in Germany a few mouths after Sir 

 Henry Thompson's article appeared. 



In Holland a number of societies for the 

 promotion of cremation have been organized 

 into an association. Several societies for the 

 same object have been formed in Germany, 

 but they made little progress in spreading 

 their views until the summer of 1876. Re- 

 cently it was announced that cremation would 

 be permitted in the duchy of Gotha without 

 the interposition of legal obstacles. Immedi- 

 ately Dr. Kiichenmeister, President of the 

 Urne Union at Dresden, proposed to enter into 

 a correspondence for the purpose of calling a 

 convention of the German unions to consider 

 the subject of erecting at Gotha a furnace for 

 cremation after the system of Friedrich Sie- 

 mens. The result of the correspondence was 

 that a congress of the friends and societies for 

 cremation of all countries met at Dresden on 

 the 6th and 7th of June. At this meeting the 

 following countries were represented: >Eng- 



