The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1875-01-16 00:00:00

"EARTH TO EARTH."

The Times has published the following interesting letter :
Sir,—An agitation, attributable possibly to an im-
perfect appreciation of the merits of the case, has been
caused by t/strproposal of certain German and Italian
writers in their own country, and of an eminent
surgeon in this, to substitute the burning of the dead
for their interment.
Interment, the apostles of Cremation tell us, in sub-
stance, if not in terms and speaking of it in its most
comprehensive sense, is repulsive in idea, costly and
ineffectual in fact, horrible in practice, a vilification
of the dead, and-a danger to the living. In a variety
o publications which have received much attention,
they denounce not any particular mode of interment,
or any palpable abuses which have crept into the prac-
tice to discredit it, but the practice itself. They take no
notice of the fact that the dead are little more than no-
minally buried and that, by the interposition between
them and the earth that should resolve them of such media
as wood, lead, brick, stone, and the like, interment as
a principle is rendered all but nugatory, and as a prac-
tice deprived of its raison d'etre. Finally they leave
it to be inferred, since they give us no hint to the
contrary, that the evils thus created are inherent in
the principle of interment, and upon this inference,
and upon no other ground, recommend Cremation.
It is the object of this letter, Sir, not so much to
join issue with the Cremationists, which I must ven-
ture to think untenable, as to invite attention to the
important fact which underlies alai, to some extent,
excuses it—viz., the fact that the dead are improperly
buried; and in reference to the serious and pressing
evils which have arisen out of this fact to suggest a
consideration of the following propositions :-
1. That the natural destination of all organized
bodies that have lived, and that die, on the earth's
surface, is the earth.
2. That the evils which they (the (3remationists)
would have us believe to be inseparable from the prin-
ciple of interment are independent of that principle,
and wholly of our own creation.
3. That the source of these evils is to be found—not
in the burial of the dead, but in the unreasoning senti-
ment which prompts us to keep them unburied for as
long as possible, and then to bury them in such a way
that the earth can have no access to them.
4. That the burial of the body supposes its resolu-
tion by the direct agency of..the earth to which we
commit it, and, again, that the earth is fully competent
to effect that resolution.
5. That to seek to prevent this-beneficent agency by
enclosing the dead in hermetically sealed coffins, brick
graves, and vaults is in the highest degree unphilo-
sophical, since it does but engage us in a vain resistance
to an inevitable dispensation, and since it has led us to
accumulate in our midst a vast store of human re-
mains in every stage and condition of decay.
G. That the remedy for such evils is not in Crema-
tion but in a sensible recognition of, and a timely
submission to, a well-defined law of nature, and in
legislative action to enforce the provisions of that
law.
The claim that the earth has upon its dead, no less
than that which the dead have upon the earth, is a
proposition, one would have thought, too obvious to
merit discussion. To understand it we need only
consider the properties (I had almost written at-
tributes) with which the soil at our feet and every-
where at our disposal has been endowed; that it
is the most potent antiseptic known, and the
readiest of application, and that, by a combination
of forces inherent in it which might well appear
contradictory but for the wonderful purposes they are
destined to effect, it is resolvent and re-formative as
well; that what under the influence of the air was
putrefaction, in the earth is resolution; that which
was offensive, becomes inoffensive; that which was
decay, a process of transmutation. To doubt that one
of the purposes for which the earth was thus endowed
is the resolution and conversion of its dead, or its per-
fect competency to effect that purpose, would pass
comprehension if habit had not taught us to shut our
eyes to it, and if the advocates of Cremation had not
stepped in to tell us that we may improve upon it.
The main conditions of effective and of non-effective
burial are shortly these. When the body dies, putre-
faction sets in at onoe, and, for as long as it is allowed
to remain exposed to the air, continues. The air
excluded, the process is arrested. The air read-
mitted, the process goes on. If the body have been
dead some days and putrefaction be well advanced
before the adoption of measures to protect it from
the influence of the air, the process will be arrested
at the point it has then attained, and, for as long as
the physical conditions are permitted to last, will
remain at that point. Two methods of excluding
the air from a dead body present themselves in
praatice, the direct and natural method of placing it
in the earth, and what maybe called the evasive and
unnatural method of enclosing it in an air-tight case
or coffin. By adopting the first method, inasmuch as
we both exclude the air and invoke the resolvent
action of the earth, we fulfil all the conditions of
effective burial. By adopting the second method
we fulfil only one of these conditions, and, for .the
sake of keeping the body by us for a few days' pre-
vent the other. In the first case resolution at once
takes the place of decay; in the last the state of decay
is perpetuated. In the first case if we look for that
body at the end of five or six years we shall not find it,
or, rather, we shall' be unable to distinguish its tissues
from the earth with which by that time it will have
become assimilated., In the last, if we look for it after
fifty years, we shall find it as we left it, plus the action
upon it of the air and of the fluids of the body which
we have included with it in the coffin that is to say, in
a state of advanced but unprogressive decay.
The following illustrations represent aptly enough
the two conditions described :- -
On Christmas Day, 1870, I buried, in a corner of
my garden, the body of a favourite dog. On the Ist
of November, 1874—the other day—l dug down upon
the spot, and recovered all that was recoverable of the
body of my old companion. The residue lies upon a
sheet of white foolscap paper on the table before me.
It consists of a few scattered bones, with a little friable
matter loosely attached to them which has all the
physical characters of common earth, without smell or
anything to indicate that it has once been animal
tissue. Resolution, in fact, except as to the bones
which have lost much of their weight, and the can-
cellous structure of which is beginning to break down,
has been effected.
In 1868, I was permitted to visit the burial-ground
of St. Andrews, Holborn, then, with its contents,
in course of removal to make way for the new
Viaduct. The ground about the church had been
raised 15ft. or 181 t. above its original level, and
perpendicular sections had been made in it, here and
there, from its surface to a depth varying from 10ft.
to 301 t. more. The face of these sections represented
the interments of three centuries and a half. All
the burials, except those in the plague-pit and one
or two others to be presently mentioned, had been
made in wooden or leaden coffins, some of which
were still intact, and some broken in. In the coffins
which were intact were their contents, also intact, but
putrid, unrecognizable. In those which had been
broken in nothing was to be found but a little
ordinary earth corresponding in quantity to the solid
constituents of the body which it had replaced, and oc •
casionally, not always, a few bones. Nothing more. The
body itself had disappeared, and "earth to earth" had
been accomplished. Here and there, in other parts of
the ground, were graves lined with brick and filled with
water, in which the coffins of those who had been buried
in peculiar honour still floated, some head, some feet
uppermost, as their gaseous contents determined. Here,
again, a few fetters indicated the spot where some evil-
doer had undergone what was intended, no doubt, to be the
last sentence of degradation but whose poor body,
having had the advantage of being buried without a
coffin, had disappeared; as had also for the same
reason, the tenants of the Plague-pit. The whole
tangible remaining mass was removed, night by night
to Ilford, where it now lies in a pleasant garden, and
the new Rectory house of St. Andrew's stands upon
the restored level. The removal was effected without
difficulty, danger, or scandal, and a letter, somewhat
similar to the present one, which I wrote to you at the
time, N ,was Not printed for fear of the embarrassment
it might ocbasion while the ghastly work was in pro-
gress.
These illustrations*will now help us to realise the
following facts :-
1. That the condition of these unresolved dead is
precisely the condition to which all are condemned
who have been kept unburied for a week and then
buried in close coffins.
2. That this dead population—these festering ten-
ants in perpetuity of the soil—outnumber by hundreds
of thousands the living population above them, and
that unless, as in the case of the Holborn burial-
ground, an Act of Parliament should interpose to
remove them, there they must lie incapable of further
change, a reproach to our intelligence and a source of
poison to our springs for any time to come.
3. That, unwarned and undeterred by the magni-
tude of the evils we have thus created, we are still
engaged in extending and perpetuating them in ceme-
teries so close to the town that they must soon become
a part of it.
4. That were the dead only properly buried not one
of the evils here described would have any existence—
not a single dead body would remain to infect the soil
—and a quantity of land of incalculable value, now
hopelessly alienated, would be liberated for purposes
of utility.
And what, after all, is the nature of the advantage
that we purchase at this heavy cost, and to obtain
which we do not hesitate to deprive the dead of
their sole prerogative? Simply and solely the satis-
faction of keeping them unburied a few days longer
than Nature intended! The body that should
have been laid in the ground three days ago still
lies upstairs, a sheet drawn over the face to protect
it from the flies, and the windows slightly opened to
relieve the upper, part of the house of the aura that
has begun to pervade it. No one who could help it ,
has gone into the room these three days, and theyl
who have had to pass the door have passed it
hurriedly and furtively. Then' when from its con-
dition the body can no longer be allowed to remain.
exposed, au(' when, in reason, its interment should be
effected, comes instead the stereotyped announcement
that the "closure of the coffin can be no longer de-
layed," and then three, or even four, more miserable,
fretful, useless days follow. You cannot go out—it
would not be decent; you cannot sleep because you
cannot go out; your waking hours are passed in a
forced and irritating inactivity, your nights are Vkinful
endeavours to realise the cherished lineaments which,
by an evasion of Nature, you are still able to keep with-
in a few feet of you—not, indeed, as yap say:, them when
summoned to lookupon them for the last time be fore they
were " screwed down," buVas they were a week before,
be vutiful with the peculiar beauty that distinguishes
tha recently dead, and the impression of which you
would have been only too glad to be able to retain.
At length the shuffling of many feet upon the stairs,
and the dull shocks sustained by the walls in the
descelit'ofl/4 the heavy coffin, tell you that the time has
come when 'custom has decreed that you may be re-
leased and the dead put to its rest. And what a rest!
Surely, Sir, it is time that we put an end to so
irrational a practiee and opened our eyes to the fact
that we cannot thus outrage Nature with impunity;
that whenevAr. it ma please uB to biz our dead
properly (and nothing is easier) Earth be-foißci
competent to do her own work and Nature tc'eany
out her own laws; and that recourse to Cremation,

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