Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, on October 18, 1884 (IA b21778929).pdf/13

 A. One thing that this College did last year was to show regard for the bodily remains of Harvey. There was a some- thing of him-that neither painting nor busteould be which it still wished to cherish. It would try to hold together, yet longer, the last remnants of what was once the medium through which he saw Nature, and by which he read many of her scerets, and revealed them. This wish is natural; and old because it is so. If some Eastern nations, in their great rever- enec for the Soul, have taken means to display their contempt for the Body which it has left, sueh peoples have been the ex- eeption. The Pyramids, the Abbeys, the great burial-grounds in town and country, and the world's great surface, seattered over with its complex or simple tombs, all tell the same story of regard for the dust and ashes of those who are gone. Even if the body has been burned, the Urn has been found to hold together the ashes that the flames have not had power to kill. We may know, and admit " to what base uses we may return;" but still, we resent or reeoil from the degradation. There is a widely spread human struggle against allowing the bodies of those we have known, and reverenced, and loved, to merge into the common carth. We set up our barriers against it; we entomb, and we embalm; we carry on a fight, as strong in feeling as it may be futile in effect, but still, a real fight, against physical disintegration. This may be all very foolish and unseientific; but yet, we will, if we ean, keep together something of the individual, so long as time and outside forces are not too strong for us; and we utter a parable, as we do so, of our regard not only for the bodies, but for the lives of those individual men, as we tell of, or come to know them, in the thousand biographies, that surround us, caeh one of which is, in its very essenee, "a feeble struggle with death."

The notion that some spark or germ of life might lie hidden in the ashes that were buried or inurned ("lateat