2 The West American Scientist. 



Cemeteries are a growing - evil and a danger. They encroach 

 upon the domain of living men and their uses. They pollute the 

 air and the water. One generation of men revels out its little life 

 upon the earth, passes away and gives place to a succeeding one. 

 But cemeteries seem designed to endure forever. Fifty millions 

 of people in our own land walk the earth to-day. Where shall 

 they be laid, and where the millions of the next succeeding gen- 

 erations? The moving tides of living humanity will be turned 

 from their channels to give way to the advancing armies of the 

 dead. 



Says Sir Henry Thompson, "No dead body is ever placed in 

 the soil without polluting the earth, the air and the water above 

 and about it." 



The experiments of Pasteur and others have shown that earth- 

 worms bring to the surface myriads of bacteria from the bodies 

 of decomposing dead. 



No successful means of counteracting these destructive agencies 

 have been discovered. All known disinfectants are under some 

 circumstances imperfect and unreliable, or of difficult or impossi- 

 ble application. Those upon which the greatest reliance has 

 been placed are too often only deodorants. The only true dis- 

 infectant is fire. Correct principles of cleanliness require that 

 filth likely to become dangerous which cannot be otherwise per- 

 fectly destroyed, should be burned. The value of this principle 

 in the sanitation of cities, is so well recognized that methods are 

 being introduced of destroying by fire garbage and all animal 

 and vegetable substances liable to decay. 



With the general adoption- of cremation there would likely fol- 

 low relief of one of the burdens of society in funeral reform. 

 While there is nothing in the. process of incineration of bodies 

 calculated to detract from a becoming reverence for the " mold 

 once hallowed by the Almighty's breath," it is calculated to de- 

 tract in some degree from the superstitious reverence now pre- 

 vailing for "this muddy vesture of decay which doth grossly close 

 us in," the barren casket from which the gem — the man himself 

 — has fled forever. 



The method of cremation furnishes us with a residuum in the 

 ashes derived from the actual substance of the body of the de- 

 parted — a tangible memento — which may be inurned and pre- 

 served with all the care and reverence and adorned with all the 

 beauty which a refined taste can suggest. The preservation of 

 such a memento in the case of earth burial would be impractica- 

 ble and most undesirable. 



Every consideration of value is in favor of cremation. Objec- 

 tions to it are of sentiment and not of reason. They exist usually 



