THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 316, 19 March 1875, Page 3

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD.

Mr. Seymour Haden, in a letter which fills more than two columns of the London ' Times ' argues that all the evils which the advocates of cremation assert as inherent in the principle of interment arise from. the fact that the dead are improperly buried. Mr. Haden contends that "the natural destination of all organised bodies that have lived, and that die on the earth's surface is the earth that the source of the evils arising from our present mode of interment is to be found " not in the burial of the. dead but in the unreasoning sentiment which prompts us to keep them unburied for as long as possible, and then to bury them in such a way that the earth can have no access to them." The burial of the body, Mr. Haden asserts, " supposes its resolution by the direct agency of the earth to which we commit it, and that the earth is fully competent to effect that, resolution," and he holds that "to seek to prevent this beneficent agency by enclosing the dead in hermetically sealed coffins, brick graves, and vaults, is in the highest degree unphilosophic-al, since it does but engage us in a vain resistance to an inevitable dispensation, and since it has led us to accumulate in our midst a vast store of human remains in every stage and condition of decay." Mr. Haden proposes that interment should take place in not more than thirty-six hours after death; and that a public officer should be appointed in "each to take cognisance of everything relating to the dead of that district; and he suggests that coffins, if they &re used at all, should be of some light, permeable material, such as wickerwork, open at the top, "and filled in with any fragrant herbaceous matter that happens to be in season." The earth would not then be prevented from doing its own work of resolution, which would be accomplished in five or six years, and we might bury again in the same ground. Mr Haden recommends the abolition of the permanent tenure of the ground by the dead, and of the use of brick graves and vaults, and suggests that'our dead might be buried in the lowland tracts of alluvial soil on the KeDt and Essex banks of the Thames, by which means much of the valuable land in aud about the city now occupied as cemeteries might be restored to better uses, and the lowlands of Essex and Kent be drained, planted, and beautified, with equal benefit to the land and to ourselves. Cremation Mr. Haden objects to, as a troublesome and wasteful form of burial.