CREMATION.

Waikato Argus, Volume IV, Issue 270, 5 April 1898, Page 4

CREMATION.

DEsriTE the fact that science has fully demonstrated that cremation is the only method of disposing of the dead, reverently and safely, when we have regard to the welfare of the living, it is matter of surprise that the movement does not progress with that speed which would gratify sanitarians and render life certainly better protected from boil infection than it is to-day. I observe that in Liverpool, where a crematorium has been successfully in operation for over a year, the directors of the company complain of the relatively small share their apparatus is allowed to take in the disposal of the dead. Some ten cremations, I believe, have taken place, all haviug been performed with success. Myself an earnest advocate of cremation, I hare noted not any great objection to the process, but rather an indifference to the larger question : "How should the dead be disposed of with reference to the sanitary safety of the living?" "Out of sight, out of mind," is a faying which applies to the dead most exactly. Nothing is thought of the sanitary relations of the dead to the living. You don't destroy disease-germs by long burial in the earth ; and ordinary burial is simply, iu the long run, a piocess of infecting the soil with countless microbes. When these find their way into water or air, they must propagate their disease anew ; and then we speak with bated breath of the subtle nature of infection and of the mysterious fashion in which diseases appear without, apparently, any preceding cases to give them birth. This is the sanitary side of cremation. The pure, cleansing fire leaves nothing corrupt behind it. All is consumed and converted, save the minerals of the bone 3, into heated gases, which are given forth to the air, and are speedily dissipated as they mingle with the great air-ocean into which they are discharged. Contrast this clean]}', rapid process with the filthy thing we call " burial." It is not really burial at all. To carry out that process truly, the earth —and it must be a dry, loamy soil must be in contact with the body. The body must be immersed in it, that, in Nature's own chemical processes, it may be taken to pieces in an inoffensive manner ; for it may be added that cremation and burial are, chemically, much the same, after all is said and done. The one is a quick burning in the furnace ; the other, a slow burning in the earth. Do we ever carry out burial properly ? I should say not, unless we place the body in a readily perishable coffin in a proper soil, and it i 3 just the difficulty of getting a proper soil which is the crux of the burial question. As often as not, cemetery soils preserve the bodies buried in them. Lately, in Paris, bodies were recognisable six years after burial.

With such ulcus before us, why has cremation not advanced in public estimation as we had hoped it would, as the only method of " burial" worthy the name? First, because of that public indifference whereof I have already written ; and second, because of a positive and mistaken notion regarding the nature of cremation itself. I have met with people whose ideas of cremation were noddled on the pictorial representation they had seen of a Hindoo funeral pyre. Others spoke about " the blazing furnace" into which the body was cast. This is all sheer nonsense. There is no tire or blazing furnace. All is done so decently and in order that when the c llin is slid into the furnace and the door shut nothing more is seen. There is no fire to be witnessed, no horrible sight—all is infinitely more impressive than the bedraggled hideous procession to the grave, where a costly coilin, calculated to preserve the body for years from the earth, is pu.-hed into a dirty hole and left. The idea of "God's Acre " is very pretty and very tent linen tal, with itsgrassy mounds, its wreaths, and its remembrances of the dead ; but sentiment mii3t surely stop at the surface. " The mind's eye," it is to be hoped, does not penetrate a few feet below the grass, where festering decomposition is the order not of one day, but of all days. No ; cremation i 3 the one solution of the burial question. We can have urnburial of the ashes thereafter if we choose, and the csmetery of the future will be a beautiful garden where the urns will be deposited in some temple, and where the surroundings will suggest Dot mortality and decay, but incorniption and ever-reviving life. The time lias come for the full and free recognition of cremation as the solution of the burial difficulty. It is for every thinking man and woman to proclaim a belief iii the beneficent nature of the process,

and to give his or her personal adherence to the movement by directing that when their lime has come to cross the bar, their e'ements shall be made to mingle speedily and inoffensively with the Nature-Mot her from whom they were derived. —Dr. Andrew Wilson.