Cremation of the Dead. Essie William

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СКАЧАТЬ href="#n39" type="note">39 he proved himself much wiser than our generation.

      The general adverse feeling to burning even the dead bodies of animals at the present day, has without doubt often brought about serious evils. During the Crimean war the putrefaction of numberless horses in and around the French camps became ultimately a serious matter,40 and had they been destroyed by fire no evil effects could have followed. Why were they not destroyed by fire? – for fear of offending the prejudices of their allies? For one reads that in the battle of Paris, on March 30, 1814, 4,000 horses which were killed, were burnt twelve days afterwards. It is doubtful, too, whether or not the removal of diseased cattle from our midst by burial only, is sufficient to stamp out a very virulent plague. I find that during the great plague of 1865, in Great Britain alone 132,000 cattle were attacked; 17,368 of which were killed, and 81,368 of which died.41 Had a few hecatombs been slain and burnt at the commencement of the visitation, or had the initial thousand of sickly ones been slain and consumed by fire in Russia, the steppe murrain would have been speedily stamped out.

      In a similar manner should be treated the whole of the meat seized as unfit for food. In Gloucester, some years ago, and when the mayor had no power to fine the vendors of bad butchers' meat, the carcases were, it is said, destroyed by fire outside the city wall. Would that such jurisdiction existed now! In the metropolis alone, thousands of tons of animal food are yearly condemned, to say nothing of fruit and vegetables. The State should burn these up with even more alacrity than contraband of custom. And the purification by fire might be even extended to the humblest things. It has been said that the lower animals which perish in our midst must perforce send thousands of pounds of mephitic vapour daily into the air, if left unburnt.42 It is not necessary to enumerate what else it would be desirable to destroy in this way. They can be seen in nearly every river, canal, and pond, in every ditch, gutter, and even street.

      Medical men are the chief exponents of the good results which will follow the adoption of cremation, and with one exception the whole of the foreign writers upon the subject are professors of some branch of medical science. It is the same in our own country.43

      CHAPTER II

      METHODS OF TREATING THE DEAD

      It will be necessary for my purpose to give a short description of the chief modes of disposing of the dead, and to quote a very few examples of each practice. In instancing such examples, I will as much as possible confine myself to my note-books of the last four years, and by so doing the matter will not only be more likely to possess novelty, but it will have been based upon the late observations of our distinguished travellers and possess authenticity.

      The first method of disposal which I will mention is Exposure, which might be better described as no burial at all. The Colchians and Phrygians at one time hung the dead bodies upon the limbs of trees,44 and some of the Indians of the Plains of North America to the present day do little else, since they expose their dead, after a rude bandaging, upon platforms erected upon the top of tall poles. Many ancient nations, however, purposely exposed their dead to the predatory instinct of animals. For instance, the Syrcanians abandoned their dead to wild dogs.45 The ancient Ethiopians threw their dead into the water, to be devoured by aquatic animals.46 The Parsees, as far back as 400 B.C., and for an untraced time previously, exposed their deceased friends upon high gratings to feed birds of prey, and such 'towers of silence' are in use up to the present day. Dr. Aveling informs me that in India they are accustomed to carry the body to the top of a hill and place it upon a stone slab, returning for it in order to bury it when the bones are picked clean. Disturbances have frequently taken place of late between the Hindoos and Parsees owing to this practice, for the vultures and other birds often let fall portions of the body during their flight into the gardens of the former. And speaking still of our own times, the Hindoos often expose their dead by the banks of their sacred river to the attacks of the river monsters; some of them even, when fuel is scarce, cast the partly burnt body into the Hooghly. Some Kaffir tribes also remove the dead out of sight to spots in the bush, where they are devoured by wild beasts.47

      Casting the body into the deep is another form of exposure, with the reservation that although it is understood to be in the nature of things that it will be devoured by the lower animals, this is not the primary motive. The practice is common with all maritime nations on the occurrence of deaths out at sea. Burial in the sea generally has, however, of late been recommended as a panacea for the ills seen to be consequent upon inhumation. One writer48 pictures the 'dead ship' daily departing from the strand with its lifeless burden, and reverently and prayerfully committing the bodies to the bosom of the 'mystic main,' until the time when the sea shall give up its dead. But there is little to recommend the practice, even if the idea were not revolting to a people who exist largely upon fish and crustaceans. When a flight of locusts was some years ago swept by a storm into the Bay of Smyrna, many people there would not feed upon fish for a considerable time afterwards, and what would the feeling be if only the dwellers in our littoral towns and villages followed out burial in the sea? Even the sinking of the bodies with heavy weights down to the ocean's depths would be hazardous. The only people who appear to practise sea-burial are the aborigines of the Chatham Islands. When a fisherman there departs this life, they put a baited rod in his hand, and, after lashing him fast in a boat, send him adrift to sea.49 But I need not further continue the subject,50 and I think that it may be taken for granted, that sea-burial, or immarment, or immersion, or aquation, or whatever names the method may be known by, will never become general. The ancient Lacustrine dwellers did not practise water-burial, but disposed of their dead upon terra firma, evidently from motives that have already been explained.

      A method of petrifaction has lately been broached, and has met with some adherents. Something is to be produced similar to a relic which I once saw for sale in Manchester, taken from a guano-bed about thirty years ago, and which had been interred in the phosphates about a hundred and fifty years previously. In a cave in the Bay of Nipea, a number of bodies were discovered which had been petrified by the waters of some springs. The latest mode of effecting this kind of sanitary preservation was practised upon the body of Mazzini; and the result was, I understand, very disappointing.

      A system of inhumation analogous to that practised when stone-coffins were in use is now agitating in Germany.51 It is proposed to encrust the subject over with a cement, and, after placing it in a sarcophagus of similar artificial material, to pour more of the same matter in a fluid state around it, so that the dead would be entombed in a solid matrix of long-enduring material. But those who are practically acquainted with the nature of cements, or rather with the impossibility of resting assured that proper cements would always be used, will know that it is more than likely that, out of the 32,000 who are said to die annually per million, one-half of the bodies would be enveloped in an impoverished material, which would speedily fall to pieces, with disastrous results. Dr. Sedgwick has expressed himself as certain that even plaster of Paris would prove ineffective in preventing the exhalations from coffins. Supposing, too, that each of the defunct required a space of one cubic yard only, where could cemeteries be obtained which could afford permanently to alienate 32,000 cubic yards of space per million annually? The scheme carries wildness upon its very face. Something analogous to this system of burial was the strange one carried out by the ancient Peruvians. A late traveller52 has described some of the Huacas, as the places were called, and the well-preserved remains of which are still to be seen. It was a system of piling up coffins of plaster in pyramid fashion, to such an extent that one of these pyramidal mounds measures СКАЧАТЬ