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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
or to the fire to be resolved into thin gir. It was to be held 
so that the spirit which once animated it might at some strange 
and eventful moment re-enter its tabernacle and reign in it 
again, incorruptible. In this ideal we have the origin of a 
belief which is still most prominent in the thoughts of man- 
kind : a root of a faith symbolised specially, and accepted also 
by millions of men. In our care of burial of the dead, in our 
sepulchres and stately tombs, we strive to express what the heart 
prompts from this source. The ideal received its fullest re- 
cognition in the process of disposal of the dead by embalming. 
The poorest and the richest Egyptian preserved his dead, in this 
hope, with all the perfection his means could devise. The rich 
man with his costly gifts left his lifeless friend in the hands of 
the embalmer for seventy days, and received back the body 
swathed in cloth and gum, so perfectly prepared, that set up 
amongst the living or laid in the sarcophagus of all but solid 
stone, it could be left safe there for all the ages that were to 
come ; left, not dead, but waiting in solemn silence for the 
renewal of life that would one day as surely revive it as the sun 
revives the silent earth into the living day. 
When father Abraham, refusing the gift, bought of Ephron 
the Hittite for four hundred shekels of silver the field before 
Mamre, that he might bury his dead out of his sight in the 
cave of Machpelah, he followed another disposal of the dead 
which, through all the variations of the marvellous race he 
founded, has held its course. To the Greek this mere burial were 
barbarous ; to the Egyptian a poor imitation of that perpetua- 
tion of mortality by which the mortal would be made to rejoin 
the immortal part. Yet again it symbolised, in another way, 
the same ideal. The seed sown in the ground is buried, but 
does it not spring up again? That which is sown is not 
quickened unless it die. And so with the body : it is sown in 
corruption, it is raised in incorruption : it is sown a natural, it 
is raised a spiritual body. How fixedly this principle of bury- 
ing in the earth, of returning to the earth that which came 
from it, has remained rooted in the minds of men, through 
Jewish interpretation, let any thinking person consider. The 
masses cling to it despite pictures of disgust, however realistic ; 
and even the choicest of our philosophers have held by it to 
their final sleep, and have written of it themselves. 
44 The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer, (like the cover 
of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its 
lettering and gilding) lies here food for worms. Yet the work 
itself shall not be lost, for it will (as he believed) appear once 
more in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended 
by the Author.” 
In these later days the disposal of the dead has been consi- 
