CREMATION.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 42, 18 July 1874, Page 3

CREMATION.

[From the “New York Herald.”] We are in a quandary just now as to the proper disposal of the dead. Heretofore, the matter has been decided by the religious sentiment of the community, and those who have left us have been put to rest in Greenwood under the daisies; but now the practical sense of utility asserts itself and demands that a man shall practice economy while living and be economised when dead. Sir Henry Thompson has written a paper which has set all the malcontents of society by the cars. He thinks it a very grave matter to bury people, and suggests the possibility of disposing of the dead in such a way as to render the Chincha Islands entirely unnecessary. With a nicety more mathematical than sentimental, he gives the exact number of pounds of rich compost into which the annual dead of London may be resolved, and tells us with unsurpassed pathos that we have lost an incalculable amount of money by not converting the millions who have gone into fertilising material. Just think of the delights of changing our mothers-in-law and all our poor family relations into valuable bone dust! It is an opportunity too good and far too profitable to be lost. In the near future some fanciful speculator may get up a corner on human cinders and earn a living by burning the dead. We have heard of a Frenchman who has been so fascinated by this new movement that he has bequeathed his body to the chemists, declaring that, since he has given light to the world by his works for twenty years, it is no more than fair that his remains should be converted into gas that he may continue to give light after death. When you look at the matter from an economic standpoint only, disabusing your mind of all foolish sentiment, this view of the subject is quite worthy of the age wc live in. It is a pity that the suggestion is not American ; but we can easily avenge ourselves for having more reverence for the dead than the rest of the world by taking possession of the market. We can pay a higher price for bodies than those dull Englishmen, who are not accustomed to making money by the ream, as wc do. Before long, doubtless, we shall establish agencies, semi-real estate agencies, since the ashes are to be used to enrich the soil, where wc can sell all our incinerated friends and relations.