

Vol. VI. APRIL, 1889. No. 42 



CREMATION. 



(Read before the San Diego Society of Natural History, March 1, 1889.) 

 BY GEORGE WILLIAM BARNES, M. D. 



Having been asked for some expression upon the subject of 

 cremation, I beg the privilege of submitting, briefly, a very few of 

 the many and weighty reasons I have for favoring incineration in 

 preference to inhumation of the dead. 



First: reasons based on sanitary grounds are most potent. The 

 •earth is the most convenient depository for putting out of sight 

 whatever is offensive or deleterious or cannot be tolerated above 

 its surface. The soil is not, however, always destructive, but 

 often preservative of the products o animal and vegetable decom- 

 position. It is more than a probability that pestilential diseases 

 are by earth-burial transmitted from one generation to another, 

 and thus perpetuated indefinitely. If the seeds of plants can be 

 preserved for centuries, and then under favoring conditions be 

 made to germinate and reproduce their kind, so thegerms of con- 

 tagious disease after having been entombed for ages may be 

 warmed into lite under suitable environment, and spread contagion 

 among the living. To this source may often be attributed the 

 sudden outbreak of epidemics and the occurrence of forms of 

 disease not previously known in the locality. Evidence is not 

 wanting that bodies which had perished from infectious disease 

 on being exhumed or the products of their decomposition dis- 

 turbed many years after interment have communicated the same 

 disease to the living. 



A full acceptance of modern theories of germ aetiology need 

 not be implied in the belief that from this Pandora's box or 

 mummy dust a flood of evils may desolate the land. 



If phosphorescent and gaseous emanations may ascend from 

 decaying bodies through a considerable stratum of earth, whether 

 harmless in themselves or not, they may be the vehicles for con- 

 veying the seeds of disease to the living. In view, therefore, of 

 the frequency with which such products of decay are disturbed 

 and brought to the surface by voluntary and accidental agencies 

 there are the strongest reasons for the conclusion that the sum of 

 human suffering and the records of mortality are largely swelled 

 by these influences. 



