pleasantly. The answer may be practically supplied in a properly 

 constructed furnace. The gases can be driven off without offensive 

 odour, the mineral constituents will remain in a crucible, The 

 gases will ere night be consumed by plants and trees. The ashes 

 or any portion of them may be preserved in a funeral urn, or may 

 be scattered on the fields, which latter is their righteous destination. 

 No scents or balsams are needed, as on Greek and Roman piles, to 

 overcome the noxious effluvia of a corpse burned in open air. 

 Modern science is equal to the task of thus removing the dead of a 

 great city, withoiit instituting any form of nuisance ; none such as 

 those we tolerate everwhere from many factories, both to air and 

 steam. Plans for the accomplishment of this have been considered." 

 The above quotation puts the case strongly for the cremationist. 

 The argument most commonly brought against cremation — it was 

 used by the Home Secretary in 1884 in reply to Dr. Cameron's 

 speech, in support of the Bill for the " Disposal of the Dead " — is 

 that crimes of violence and secret poisoning will then go undetected. 

 Now, as regards the former, the probability is, that the body would 

 be subjected to a much more searching and rigid examination 

 before cremation than is ordinarily the case, and thus any injury 

 would be more likely to be discovered. The present mode of ex- 

 amining bodies before burial is most carelessly done. As regards 

 secret poisoning, we have to consider the organic poisons and the 

 metallic ones. The former undergoes the same change, whether 

 cremation or common burial takes place ; the latter, after crema- 

 tion, would remain in the ashes, with the exception of arsenic. 

 For the same reason as mentioned just before, the poison would 

 be almost as likely to be traced as now. One of the strongest 

 arguments advanced in favour of a radical change in our burial 

 laws, is the present lamentable insecurity that exists for finding 

 the true cause of death Our burial laws contain elaborate provi- 

 sions for certificates, which most of us are pleased to consider as 

 affording all the security required or possible for the discovery and 

 registration of the cause of death. But anyone who chooses to 

 look into the subject will see that this is a mere delusion, and that, 

 however efficacious oui system may be for the preservation of 

 evidence of the effect of death, so far as regards the exact mode of 

 death, or its occurrence from natural or criminal causes, our system 

 is utterly unreliable in the very instances when it is most import- 

 ant that it should work effectively. A very large number of our 

 population die without any medical attendance at all, oi at least 

 without having ever received sufficient medical attendance to enable 

 a certificate of the cause of death to be given worth the paper on 

 which it is written. In many of these cases some sort of a worth- 

 less certificate is procured and presented to the registrar, but many 



