The Lambertville record. [volume] (Lambertville, N.J.) 1872-1968, 1876-07-26
MISCELLANY.
oUR TRUE URIAL PLACE.

oUR TRUE URIAL PLACE.
C-cr tie places that receive the bodies of
the dead, monuments are erected n If to msik
the last Interchangeable abode Vt the departed.
Yet, even in tie crudest materialistic sense,
our Anal home 10 not In tho eaI b Nature
soon rides the grave and disperses its con-
tents into the atmosphere above. Not the
cbarnelhouse upon which 1T Ell On has been
hitherto so intensely fixed by poets and
preachers, but tho upper realm of rainbows
aud light, of evcr-shifting clouds. of the gold
ca glories of sunrise and sunset, the world OF
everlasting beauty in the gence ef the
day and the splendors of tue hight--this is,
ID reality, the tomb of man. Even in the
lowest sense we need to look beyond the
crave and death would wear very differ
ent aspect If VIC could escape from the vulgar
and repulsive associations Of mere burial,
which we owe to graveyard poetry, food-for-
worms literature, and the emphatic parade Of
interncnt. The atmosphere is Thousand
times more the theatre of life than is the
earth beneath US. All living things are born
from 1t. The entire vegetable kingdom has
been condensed out of its invisible elements,
and in decay and dissolution, except little
ashy residue. 1t is all again restored to the
atmosphere. The animal world follows the
same law. All sentient creatures are con-
gtructed out of the viewless medium above
and back to its serene depths they are all
at length returned. The processes are slow,
but they are complete and memorable, art can
not arrest them. Thouga the body be en-
balmed for preservation, the course OF Ma
fnre is only transiently checked, and the dis
severed atoms soon find their way back to
their atmospheric home. The crenationists
are disauieted at burial aud our mortuary
rites, and would send the dead back in haste
to the serial world on the wings Of bonfire
But why be INPATIENT The grave is but
convenient incident in the cycle of transfor-
nations. Nature will do her own work IN her
own measured and efficient way. She has
time enough, and prefers to use it. Slowly
and gradually is it again unfolded. In fact,
the processes are SO closely involved and
bound up in a common method that they pro-
coed together, and life and death are but diff
ferent sides of the same thing. The atnos-
phere that is finally to claim us is Also taking
us back to itself, moment by moment, in ev-
cry breath. Interstitial death, the CONSTANT
dissolution OF the organic system, and the ex-
puision of its dead particles by respiration, is
the essential condition of continued life. We
begin 10 die as soon as we begin to live, and
are dying as long as We live. Nature con-
POUNDS our convenient distinctions, and tells
us that man does twenty times more dying
In the course of his life than in his final de-
mise The living body is a whirlpool of de- |
structive transformations incess unity counter
acted, In which life is the constantly sustain
ed result. II, to maintain its vital energies
and enabled him to keep up the course of life
work, a man of seventy has had to drink up
ward Of fifty tons of water, to eat thirty tons
Of solid food, aud inhale more than fifty thou
sand pounds Of oxygen gas, which have been
expended in the vital reactions Of living aud
dying, how little, comparatively, OF death is
there in the final arrangement of his worm
out machinery when tie changes cease TO go
ON in co-ordinated way That plant, an
animal, in relation to the atmosphere exert
antagonizing influences, is well understood.
One posons and the other purifies, and SO
firmly does nature hold the balance on
grand scale, from epoch TO epoch, that the
constitution Of tho atmosphere is kept in
stable harmony with the delicate require.
ments Of living beings.-E. L. Youmans, IN
Appleton's Journal for July.