Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/705

Rh It may here, of course, be objected that the earth is really spacious enough for all our wants, and that crowded cemeteries are the result of heedlessness, not of necessity. But in this remark there is no more truth than in the commonplace answer to Malthusian arguments, that there are plenty of thinly settled districts still to be occupied. Space there is, no doubt, both for the living and for the dead, if they could be conveniently carried to it; but there is often too little space where people find themselves obliged to live and die. Crowds are a necessity of progress, it seems; at all events, the art of getting on well in solitude has not yet been discovered, and we are required by nature to find ways of helping our neighbors where they are, rather than of sending them away. At least, let us find ways to avoid injuring them.

Provision must be made in the neighborhood of large towns for numerous interments. The land available for the purpose is limited by the wants of the living, who can not afford to leave large tracts unoccupied. To make cemeteries serve the purpose of parks and pleasure-grounds would be certainly indecorous and probably unwholesome. On the whole, it is scarcely possible that, under existing circumstances, our burying-grounds should not be overcrowded.

For the inhabitants of maritime districts it has been suggested that the sea, at a sufficient distance from shore, might serve a good purpose as a cemetery. But the practical objections to this plan, resulting from occasional periods of stormy weather, and from the impossibility of recovering corpses wanted for identification or for medical examination, are sufficient to condemn it. It would, moreover, be disagreeable in most cases to the feelings of surviving relatives and friends, and acceptable only when, as at present in many cases of death at sea, it is the only practicable method.

Most of the objections just enumerated apply with equal or still greater force to the more frequently discussed method of cremation. It is not desirable, either from a legal and medical or from a sentimental point of view, that a body should be destroyed soon after it has ceased to live. To effect this destruction in a thorough and decorous manner by burning is expensive, if attempted without complicated apparatus, the original cost of which must, in any case, be considerable. We may neglect more remote and perhaps fanciful objections, such as, for example, that the world's natural stock of ammonia might be seriously reduced in the course of centuries, if the process of decay were extensively replaced by that of complete combustion.

After reviewing the various substitutes for burial which have been tried or suggested, it happens with most minds that none of them seem on the whole to be improvements. It remains, then, to find a form of burial which will accomplish its purpose effectively and without offense or danger to the living. This form must, accordingly, be such that the earth employed for the purpose of burial shall be free from moisture or any other hindrance to rapid and inoffensive