CREMATION 
MB 
economise area, graves are dug 15 to 20 feet deep. These are filled 
by piling the dead to within a few inches of the surface. Were an 
inquiry held, siich as would be instituted by a royal, or a parliamentary 
commission, into the internal economy of our public cemeteries, the 
result would probably startle the public into demanding an immediate 
change. 
A local paper recently stated that—“ Some terrible discoveries 
as to the causes of the rapid spread and lengthened stay of epidemic 
diseases in places where the principles of sanitary sepulture are imper¬ 
fectly understood or not acted upon, have just been made by Dr. Freor, 
an eminent physician of Rio de Janeiro. That city is just recovering 
from the ravages of a very deadly visitation of yellow fever, and Dr. 
Freor, in his inquiries into the causes of the epidemic, came upon 
a dreadful fact that the soil of the cemeteries in which the victims 
of the outbreak were buried was positively alive with microbian 
organisms, exactly identical with those found in the vomitings and 
blood of those who had died in the hospitals of yellow fever. From 
a foot under the ground he gathered a sample of the earth overlying 
the remains of a person who had died of the fever and had been 
buried about a year before, and though it showed nothing remarkable 
at first appearance he found to his horror, when he placed it under 
the microscope, that it was thickly charged with these disease gferms. 
Many of the organisms were making spontaneous movements; in 
effect, therefore, the cemeteries were so many nurseries of yellow 
fever. Every shower of rain washes the soil and the fever seed which 
is so thickly sown in it into the water- courses, and distributes 
the poisonous germs all over the town and neighbourhood. ‘ Each 
corpse,’ says the doctor, ‘ is the bearer of millions of millions of 
organisms that are specifics of ill. Imagine what a cemetery must 
be in which the new foci are forming around each body.’ How 
terribly fatal these germs are is proved by the fact that the blood 
of a patient injected into a rabbit killed the animal in less than 
an hour, and the rabbit’s blood injected into a guinea-pig killed 
it in about the same time, and the guinea-pig’s blood injected into 
another rabbit was also fatal, so that the chain of destruction is 
apparently endless.” 
Round these spaces devoted to the dead, the living accumulate, 
until only the greater area distinguishes them from the surcharged 
burial-grounds of town churches. By submitting the dead body to a 
much higher temperature than that which Nature finds sufficient for 
her purposes, it is rendered perfectly harmless to the living, presenting 
hygienic advantages which must make its adoption only a question of 
time. 
Burning the dead formed a part of that wonderful civilisation of 
ancient Greece, to which we owe so much, and which will long hence 
be viewed with undiminished admiration. Excepting in the case of 
overheated haystacks and such artificial conditions, natural decom¬ 
position rarely occurs at a temperature high enough to destroy animal 
