Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/704

674 on his feet in a niche left in the walls of bones, several feet thick, which ornament the rooms. The niches being also always full, they are obliged to make room here, too, for the new-comer by breaking up and scraping the skeleton which has stood there longest, and adding his bones to the different arches and festoons which are gracefully distributed on all sides. The convent is not very full just now, so that the poor fellows rest on the average seven or eight years in their graves; formerly they were often dug up in two or three."

The earth affording this limited privilege is said to have been originally brought from Jerusalem, so that quarters in it were regarded as peculiarly desirable by the originators of the custom just described; but no doubt an equally important reason for establishing the practice was the desire to edify the living monks by the exhibition of the remains of their predecessors. Heretic sight-seers had not then begun to invade the city. If, however, the possibility of their visits had been foreseen, it might well have been supposed that the silent warnings of the dead might be more effective in their conversion than the arguments of living preachers.

It will hardly be thought that any mere secular sermon may also be preached upon the text furnished by this assemblage of bones. But we have here one solution of the problem, so much discussed in our times, of discovering the proper method for the disposal of dead bodies. We need not allow the various offensive circumstances connected with these Capuchin interments to conceal the main principle upon which they are conducted. The corpses are left to rest some years, without coffins, in dry, sheltered earth, before any step is taken toward their final disposition. If we consider these facts alone, we shall have no difficulty in perceiving that the chief objections to our common funeral usages, and to those substitutes for them which are most frequently-suggested, have been met in advance by the Capuchins. The cellar, the standing skeletons, and the festoons of bones are not essential features of the method of interment which they have adopted.

What, in fact, are the causes which have brought coffins for the dead, with all their disagreeable and dangerous consequences, into such general use? Undoubtedly, our natural wishes that the bodies of our friends should be protected, and not left exposed to accident or violence of any kind. Interments without coffins in open cemeteries will hardly be acceptable to civilized people, however much from a sanitary-point of view they may be preferable to the customary method. It is needless to engage in a discussion of the repulsive incidents which must or may attend either the use or the abandonment of coffins. We have had them unpleasantly set forth time and again, and may assume at once that all of them are, if possible, to be avoided. The ground ought not to be poisoned either more or less; and we have not room for so wide a separation of one corpse from another as to make our interments quite harmless.