Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/238

226 quick for reducing the body to the minimum of material bulk—in a word, to ashes or dust. No methods yet advanced and advocated could be of universal adaptability, for the one simple reason, if no other, that they have highly-technical features of manipulation that could not commonly be commanded. The great problem will be how to make the reduction at once a funeral ceremonial, rapid in execution, and very commendable to those who are bereaved by death. It is especially noticeable that the popular ideas have insensibly gravitated toward the burning of the dead, as the only sure and perfect method of consuming the mortal remains. It is also especially noticeable that cremation, though not without a very ancient history, has never been perfected as a process for the reduction of animal bodies to ashes. Such specimens as I have seen, after repeated experiments by this method, have not been ashes, but cinders and scraggy clinkers. Neither were they generally white, but gray and discolored. Even in ancient times, descriptions of the "assilegium," or gathering of the bones and ashes, also washing, anointing, and depositing them in urns, prove how imperfectly the combustion and calcination had been effected.

Dr. Brunetti's failure to burn the human body, after many hours of earnest effort, and a resort to breaking, by mechanical force, the bones and other hardened tissues, evidently inspired Prof. Reclam, of the Leipsic University, with a determination to solve this seemingly difficult problem. His efforts were rewarded with success. The body was perfectly consumed, by heat alone, in twenty minutes, at a cost of less than three dollars, though the apparatus, of course, was expensive. An approved apparatus would, however, serve an indefinite number of cases.

In the interests of sentiment, personal preferences, and economy, why might not scientific men suggest other ways of reducing the dead body than by means of fire? Has modern chemistry no resources? Have our electrologists no practical ideas to present? Why could there not be a lithological transformation of the dead, and a subsequent aqueous or chemical dissolution? Why may there not be a system of thorough desiccation, and subsequent pulverization?

Now, for the sake of illustrating our idea of a lithological transformation, suppose we were to submit a body to such chemical action as would convert it into one of the compounds of carbon; say, for instance, carbonate of calcium, or carbonate of magnesium, or possibly one of the hydrated compounds of carbon with calcium or magnesium. Of course, our product, if it were a carbonate of calcium, for instance, would bear some relation and resemblance to calc-spar, marble, limestone of various kinds, and chalk; also the substance of egg-shells, the shells of mollusks, and (with the addition only of a trace of phosphorus), to the bones of our body. Thus, the whole mass of structural tissues would be practically ossified. If it were a hydrocarbonate of