The daily morning journal and courier., 1895-06-27
ASHES TO AsHEs.
What Shall We Do With Our Dead
 [From the Urn.l

ptOSu dIOuuu lIle open SIdNG Ol q yOuhS
 woman. Tn life, every attribute of a
 gentle heart and mind had adored her
 regal beauty, In death she seemed a
 lovely figure of chiselled marble.
 As the burial words were read, and
 the words relative to corruption and
 interruption fell from the lips of the
 minister, the train of fancies suggested
 by those terms, caused one who had
 been near and dear to the dead girl
 to whisper a comment to companion.
 Tt is awful to think" he said, that
 in short time, by a dissolution into
 it's elements, this beautiful form that
 We knew when it was instinct with all
 the graces of life and soul, will change
 to a mass of hideousness; and that the
 now calm countenance will be distorted
 in a manner which forbids the imagina-
 tion to dwell upon it without horror"
 Fearful as are the things you sug-
 ge@t," replied the other. they pale
 before the horror of being buried alive.
 Decay can effect only a senseless body,
 and indirectly the imaginations of the
 living; particularly those who have
 looked upon exhumed corpses. These corpses are sometimes found covered with a green hairy mold; sometimes ghastly with eyes that start from their sockets and with blackened tongues that protrude from their places. While
 the imagination is shocked by such
 things, the thrill is still stronger at the thought of being buried in a spell of suspended animation. To the victim of
 such an accident the consequences must be the very essence of exquisite terror can think of nothing worse. The frantic struggles in the coffin's narrow confines; the shrieks that fail to pierce the pitiless mass of earth above; the torturing dimlnution of oxy- gen to breathe, the slow starvation without the power even to rush about and rave, unnerve the person who dwells upon the thought; what then about the reality?"
 Tt would be better, a thousand times, to be stabbed to the vitals while in the trance state than to awaken to the reality have described. These ter TOTS call in this enlightened age for a reform in the methods of disposing of the dead Such a reform is offered by cremation alone. From every consider
  dom from narrowing contemplations the incineration of the dead has es- abolished itself to fall eventually into universal adoption,'
 WHAT CREMATION IS NOT.
 Shall we give up the bodies of our loved ones to be burned? asks an ob- Jector. He has in his mind perhaps the latest hotel fire in which living be- ings, imprisoned by flaming stairways and elevator shafts, have been cut off from retreat only to be drawn later as blackened and mangled masses from the wreck. But this is not cremation.
 Cremation is not the burning of even dead bodies by contact with flames or fuel. Cremation is decomposition quick, artificbally assisted decomposi- tion, through the agency of extreme heat. It does in three or four hours what nature would take months to do under the most favorable conditions. Those conditions would be manifestly | the exposure of the dead body to the l action of sunlight and air. But we do | not expose our dead thus, nor even like l the Parsees at Bombay, place them up- on tops of the "Towers of Silence" there | to be consumed by the eagles of the | air in a single day. No, we adopt an l infinitely more repulsive way. We bury | them so that natures efforts are retard- 1 ed; so that the cleansing power of sun l light and oxygen are excluded and can | not expeditiously burn up, or in other | words, decompose the body.
 What does decomposition mean? It | is the opposite of composition. The | body is made of certain gases, fluids and | solids which we ''compose" or assemble mainly by eating food. Decomposition is the separation of the constituent ele- ments of the combination; the resolving of it into its original gases and solids By cremation the solids, as chaste as snow, are urned and preserved for ages; by burial the time eventually comes when no vestige of an ancestors form cam be found.
 What queer mass of contradiction man isl He who expresses an aversion to cremation, because he believes that it stimulates roasting or burning by flames, takes extra pains that the bodies of his beloved shall roast by the slowest methods that can be devised, and of late years he has be- come accustomed even to embalming, thus adding another stumbling block to retard natures work. That law is one of Gods most beneficent gifts to living things, which causes a clearance of the dead by setting up combustion and dis sipatipg the noxious matter.
 Nature is a master workman When on one of these processes she throws out bad odor from her lab- oratory and says: Come not beyond he danger line" Nature, to advise nan to deal sensibly and positively in he best way with the shell of clay our departed friend has left behind, so changes the appearance of that shell hat we feel instinctively that it is not ,ur friend that lies there, but only the ast-off clothing of his soul. Nature, o warn us not to interfere with her avs if we do not care to assist them, avs; "Tet me have my way, and I I will make this form so repulsive that | -ou will be glad to have me clear it rom your presence" Why, even the T 1ettled steed starts and trsmbles when [ dead one of his kind lies beside his s F But man-brilliant man, embalms, J nd collins, and seals, and buries, and C umigates, thinking he has overcome 5 laws and, in face of the self s' fo o+. hot hn ie H1y;n i,,+o W