Year: 1876

Over the place that receives the
bodies of the dead, monuments are cree
| ted rs if to mark the last Interchangeable
abode of the departed. Yet, even in


the crudest materialistis sense, our final
home is not in the earth. Nature soon


rifles the grave and disperses its con-
tents into the atmosphere above. Not
the charnel-house upon which attention


has been so intensely fixed by poets
| and preachers, but the upper realm of
rainbows and light, of ever-shifting
clouds, of the golden glories of sunset
and sunrise, the world of everlasting
beauty in the refulgence of the day and


the splendors of the night-this is, in


reality, the tomb of man. Even in the
lower sense we need to look beyond


the grave; and death would wear a very


different aspect if we could escape from


the vulgar and repulsive associations OF


the burial, which we owe to grave


yard poetry, food-for-worms literature,


and the emphatic parade of interment.


The atmosphere is thousand times
more the theatre of life than the
earth beneath us. All living things


are born from it. The entire vegetable
Kingdom has been condensed out of its


I invisible elements, aud, in decay and
dissolution, except little ashy residue,
| 1t is all again restored to the atmosphere.


The animal world follows the same
| law. Al! sentient creatures are con


structed out of the viewless medium
above, and back TO its serene depth
they are all at length returned. The
processes are slow, but they are COM
plete and ineXorable; art cannot arrest
them. Though the body be embalmed
/ for preservation, the course of Nature
is only transiently checked, and the
discovered atoms find their way back to
their atmospheric home. The crema-
tionists are disquieted at burial and our
mortuary rites, and would send the
| dead back to the aerial world on the
wings of bonfire. But why be impa-
tient. The grave is but convenient
incident in the clyde of transformations.
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 life unfolded,
and slowly and gradually it is again
infolded. In fact, the processes are
so closely involved and bound up in a
common method that they proceed to-
gether, and life and death are bnt differ
ent sides of the same thing. The at
mosphere that is finally to take us is
also taking us back to itself, moment by
moment, in every breath. Itnerstitial
death, the constant dissolution of the
organic system, and the expulsion OF
its dead particles by respiration, is the
essential condition of continued life.
We begin to die as soon as We begin to
/ live. Nature confounds 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 whirlpool
of destructive transformation incessant-
ly counteracted, in which life is the
constantly sustained result If, to
maintain his vital energies end enable
him to keep up the course OF his life
work, man of seventy has had to drink
upward of fifty tons of water, to eat
thirty tons of solid food, and inhale
more than fifty thousand pounds Of OK
ygen gas, which has been expended in
the vital reactions of living and dying,
how little, comparatively, of death l.