44 
REVIEW. 
“What are most of these places becoming, but crowded burial-grounds, 
every year more and more thickly surrounded by the dwellings of the 
living? In time their very extent must prove an evil, and from these 
acres sown with the rotting dead, a fearful harvest may some day be reaped. 
How shocking too is the practice still pursued in those parts appropriated 
to “ common interments ” — where the poor man is buried for a pound. A 
body is put in and covered with a. thin layer of earth, and then another and 
another is so placed, until — perhaps in the course of four or five days, 
during which time the grave is kept open — some ten or twelve fill it up to a 
yard or so of the suface : it is then covered up, and another pit is dug close 
beside it.” 
Soon, it is thought, these Necropoli will prove injurious 
from the vast accumulation of human remains ; like those of 
old. Mr. Loftus, in his f Travels in Chaldsea and Susiana/ 
speaking of Warka, says — 
“ ‘ It is difficult to convey anything like a correct notion of the piles 
upon piles of human relics that astound the beholder.’ On digging down 
thirty or forty feet, or until the nature of the soil rendered it dangerous to 
proceed further, they were still found ; and yet it is supposed that, beneath 
all this foul rubbish there may still exist the ruins of great cities whose 
very name can be but a conjecture.*' 
“ These vast cemeteries must once have been surrounded by, or at least near 
to, an immense population, and from them may have arisen the deadly pesti- 
lence, that with the sword and famine, swept away mankind from that part 
of the earth, and left the country 4 a desert without inhabitants.’ ‘Of all 
the desolate pictures which I ever beheld, that of Warka incomparably sur- 
passes all. A blade of grass, or an insect, finds no existence there.’ ” 
We are then told that — 
“In the year 1856, 391,369 deaths, and 657,704 births were registered ; 
and a late report of the Registrar- General states, ‘ that the natural in- 
crease of population in the United Kingdom is probably at the rate of a 
thousand a day /’ This increase is still increasing ; and as more are born 
every year, so more must die, although the growing preponderance of births 
over deaths may still continue.’ 
The proposed method of consuming the bodies of the 
dead is thus given as if being actually performed : 
“ On a gentle eminence, surrounded by pleasant grounds, stands a con- 
venient, well-ventilated chapel, with a high spire or steeple. At the en- 
trance, where some of the mourners might prefer to take leave of the body, 
are chambers for their accommodation. Within the edifice are seats for 
those who follow the remains to the last : there is also an organ, and a 
gallery for choristers. In the centre of the chapel, embellished with appro- 
priate emblems and devices, is erected a shrine of marble, somewhat like 
* Similar remains, as well as other tombs, abound in the heaps of earth 
and rubbish under which lies hid “ the miserable ruin of Nineveh,” in seem- 
ing,. fulfilment of the prophecy — “ I will cast abominable filth upon thee, 
and make thee vile.” — Nahum , iii, 6. 
