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Globe, Volume I, Issue 94, 18 September 1874, Page 4

The advocates of cremation must look to their laurels, which appear likely to be wrested from them by a German savant, Dr von Steinbeis. His proposed method of disposing of the bodies of the dead provides against injury to the living, while it offers no violence to the feeling which shrinks from destroying the corpse of a beloved friend or relation. Decomposition is, of course, an innocuous process provided its results cannot infect the air. Dr von Steinbeis therefore proposes the body with Roman or Portland cement, which hardens into a solid mass and renders the escape of noxious gases impossible. According to this plan the corpse would be placed in a sarcophagus of already hardened cement, the cavity in which it reposed would be filled up with the same material, and both would harden together into a thick slab of a substance resembling stone. Thus the deceased buiied in this manner would rest within instead of under his tombstone, and grave and monument be comprised in the same block of imitation granite. An emigrant depot has been recently opened at Blackwall, in connection with the New Zealand Agency, which will accommodate about 400 persons, and which of course is a vast improvement on the old piece-meal lodging house system. It appears, however, that the agency have been endeavoring during the past six months to obtain the loan of a hulk from the Admiralty, which would, with the permission of the Thames Conservators, have been moored below Gravesend, and to which all batches of foreign and other emigrants would have been sent, pending their final departure for the colonies. The plan is, in a sanitary and also in an economical sense, good and practical, for, as. to the former aspect, we should have had no more importations of cholera into the metropolis by means of foreign emigrants as happened last year, whereas, under present arrangements, they are now brought into the middle of the port, although congregated together, instead of being scattered as formerly over Wapping and Whitechapel. There are, as we believe, a fair number of her Majesty's hulks lying in various Admiralty ports; and the Chichester school authorities have just obtained one of them —the Arethusa—which was sent up to Greenhithe some few weeks ago. But the New Zealand Agency were not so fortunate although they offered a fair rent for a vessel. But it is a pity, in view of cholera prospects this autumn, that the emigrant depot is not isolated below Gravesend instead of being situated in the east of London.