CREMATION.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 87, 10 September 1874, Page 3

CREMATION.

The New York Cremation Society is fully organised, and its members are confident of a charter from the Legislature. The society does not assume any combative attitude ; but one of the principal points thought to be desirable as a basis of organisation is the following :—“The company binds itself to perform the act of cremation on the remains of any shareholder, provided he or she shall express such desire in any way before death, and in case of no opposition from immediate relatives.” The facetious editor of the Banbury News has given thejjwarm subject of “ cremation” his coolest consideration, and thus records his opinions thereon ; —“ I hardly think, upon the whole, that I am in favor of cremation. The process seems to me to be so frightfully wasteful. At the same time, I am ready to admit that the dead might be used much more profitably than they are now. If a man must be buried, let him be planted where he will make something grow. I remember that Casselbeny, of Vineland, New Jersey, once laid his grandmother under the grape vine, and by carefully watering her twice a day he secured a crop of fifteen bushels of Black Hamburgs. The subject came up in the Agricultural Society subsequently, and there was a question whether a grandmother was the only female relative that could be efficaciously used, and whether it should be a paternal or maternal grandmother. Casselbeny explained that he had known a maiden aunt or a second cousin to do equally well, and he had his stepfather among the roots of his mammoth gooseberry bush, with every prospect of a superb crop. Very particular inquiries were made by several members copcerning the availability of mothers-in-law, and a man named Johnson said he had been married four times, and had used all of his mothers-in-law in improving the asparagus bed ; he took the first prize for asparagus at eight county fairs. Then the meeting suddenly adjourned, and fifteen mothers-in-law in Vineland died during the succeeding week. And then there is the skeleton. The Esquimaux make skates out of the collar bones of their departed friends, and I remember that Hufnagle, of Maueh Chuuk, having lost his leg by a railroad accident, took out the bone, and had it made up into a clarionet, with which he used to go around serenading a woman who refused to love him. He always played in a minor key, and they say, up at Mauch Chunk, that he whistled the most heartrending music out of that bone. When old Mackintosh of Darby died, his widow had his framework taken out, and she worked the whole of it up into knife handles and trouser buttons, which she gave to her second husband when they were married. The hottest kind of water never hurt those knife handles, and the suspender that wouldn’t stay buttoned on those buttons was admitted by everybody to be just no suspender at all, But I admit that there is something disagreeable about this form of utilisation, and, therefore, I rather incline to favor the plan of turning inanimate remains into illuminating gas by consuming them in a retort. This, I understand, is practicable ; and it would be, I should think, inexpressibly consoling to a man to sit and read the paper comfortably in the evening by the light of his deceased uncle, and to have the satisfaction of knowing that the said relative had not.been run through a meter at so much a thousand feet. It would be beautiful to illuminate the parlor with a departed hired girl, or to turn off your half-brother before going to bed. And'think what splendid gas a Congressman would make. We might have a law approprinting dead Congressmen to the Light House Board for use on the coast. This class of persons then would have the consolation of knowing that they would be much more useful after death than they are during life.”