Cremation ground

“ There are four to seven pounds of these remains from various sized adult bodies, and can be placed for preservation in a marble or terra-cotta urn, into which a photograph of the deceased, with appropriate record, can be placed before introducing the remains. This urn can be placed in the columbarium of the crematory, kept among the cherished memorials of the family of the departed, or placed beside other remains previously buried in cemeteries or graveyards.
Dr. Le Moyne favored placing the remains of the dead in a one-gallon salt-mouthed druggist’s bottle, with a large ground stopper. ”

“ Below me were the vast cremation-grounds. Again I heard footsteps. This time they passed before me and lost themselves in the grey desolation below. Half-bereft of my senses, reeling and stumbling, I dropped down on the sand and gravel of the embankment. I had no longer the least doubt in my mind that someone was trying to show me the way through these cremation-grounds to others beyond them, and that my invisible guide, the sound of whose footsteps had made me move from the lake, had just left me, for I seemed to hear the echo of his footfall still vibrating in the air. ”

“ The dead are cremated, and the widow breaks one or two of her bangles. Fire must be carried to the burning-ground by the father of the deceased, if he is alive. On the day following cremation, the hot embers are extinguished, and the ashes collected, and shaped into an effigy, near the head of which three conical masses of mud and ashes are set up. ”

“ Passing by the cemeteries of the English and the Mussulmans on their return to the city, they halted at the Hindu Burning-Ground, on the shore of the Back Bay. Here the natives are burned to ashes. For some distance they had noticed funeral processions on their way to this place. The remains are borne on open litters. A granite platform is the base of the funeral pyre, and the bodies wait their turn to be reduced to ashes; and the cremation is far more repulsive than that in our own country. ”

“ During the period we are considering, both inhumation and cremation were practised, sometimes together. The placing of the interments was as diverse as the forms and construction of the barrows. For the moment we will confine ourselves to the inhumated class. In the simplest mode of burial, the body was laid on the ground and the mound heaped over it. But often, perhaps usually, something was done to fence it in, or to protect it from the material of the mound. ”

“ You cannot preserve the buried dead securely from the outrages of the living. The people who dig graves, or are employed to remove bones, are not as a rule scrupulous, but they are very often drunk. The other day only a number of wild Irish were so employed at New York; the bodies were offered for sale on the ground to a party of medical students. These young fellows had the grace to shrink from the horrors they then witnessed. One coffin was found full of a heavy decomposed mass, like spermaceti ”

“ Next morning the chief mourner goes to the pyre, collects the ashes, and throws them into an adjoining stream. They set up an earthen vessel on a pîpal tree through which water drops for the refreshment of the thirsty spirit. While in the state of impurity, the chief mourner is armed with a stick, pointed with iron, to enable him to keep off ghosts. Every day he lays out food for the ghost along the road to the cremation ground. On the tenth day he offers lumps of rice and milk, which he throws into a tank, and all the mourners shave. ”

“ The cemetery is regarded, in general, as a permanent resting-place of the dead, where they may sleep undisturbed. Man of the present time puts his beloved into 198the dirty, dark ground, and hands them over to the foul putrefaction; he places upon their graves large, heavy monuments, as if to keep them down and prevent them from finding their way back again into this sinful world. But he thinks not of the festering mass of corruption hid away under the tombstone; to him the departed is more like one asleep, like he or she was when death claimed the mortal body. ”

“ Two miles from the mouth is a church called Pisgah, attached to which is a burying-ground. This morning when the sexton went to dig a grave, he was horrified to find half a dozen graves open and the bodies taken from their coffins and 213stretched on the ground. In one or two instances the limbs were severed from the bodies. The graves had been opened without regard to family. The bodies lay in one place arranged in the shape of a Greek cross. There is no clue to the perpetrators of the sacrilegious offense, and no reason can be imagined. ”

“ Most powerful of all in its favor is the prevention of premature burial. All these are on the side of cremation, and against it is but one—sentiment. It seems more beautiful to lay our friends to rest, softly pillowed, shrouded in satin, inclosed in rose-wood, covered with flowers, and of anything beyond we refuse to think. We erect the imposing marble, set out the blossoming plant, and carry flowers to the spot. The cemetery appeals more strongly to the sentiment than does the crematory. ”

“ The cremationists of to-day, who propose to substitute a decent æsthetic and sanitary mode of disposal of the dead for the present harmful and loathsome custom of inhumation, are repulsed, met by sentimental objections, are even called monsters without religion, without reverence for the dead.
But the apostles of incineration are as far removed from striving to suppress and murder such sacred feelings as is Dan from Beersheba. On the contrary, they believe that cremation is far more conducive to a pious veneration for the dead than interment. ”

“ Some have advocated burial at sea; others, and among them Sir Seymour Haden, have pressed forward the advantages of using perishable coffins, wicker baskets, and the like—a suggestion as excellent as it is economical, for the sooner the earth and the body meet the better it is. Perhaps, in this scientific generation, some one may invent a totally new method of disposing of the dead, which will commend itself both to those who advocate cremation and to those who dislike it. ”

“ If the guardians of consecrated sepulchres, in which people have paid an honest fee to be buried, are to dig them up and cart them off as in England, or make a show of them as here, why, I can only say that cremation will gain a good many converts. Any one would prefer urn burial to the chance of being thus made a spectacle. So good, too, it must be for the rising population to take off the edge of any salutary horror they may feel at death and decay, or of reverence for the dead. ”

“ At a burial there is but darkness, at a cremation rosy light unaccompanied by fustiness; the dead is really reduced to ashes, and with him the time-honored saying, “Peace to his ashes,” is not a hollow phrase, as it is with those who are interred.
Those who do not wish to miss religious and other ceremonies at incinerations may use any form of burial service they like, and those who desire to dispense with them may do so. And those who already have beloved dead in the cemeteries may rest by their side when the end is come, for the ashes can be interred as well as the body. ”

“ We, the undersigned members of the British Medical Association, assembled at Cambridge, disapprove the present custom of burying the dead, and desire to substitute some mode which shall rapidly resolve the body into its component elements by a process which cannot offend the living, and may render the remains absolutely innocuous. Until some better mode is devised we desire to promote that usually known as cremation. ”

“ It is an established fact that there is no certain sign of death, none but the beginning of decomposition. To prevent premature burial the body must be retained until the commencement of decay is visible. Incineration protects from the horrors of burial alive. Even if a person in a trance should be introduced into a cremation furnace, the intense heat to which the body would be subjected would extinguish life immediately and painlessly. ”

“ In these latter days when over crowded cemeteries and the levelling of graveyards in the midst of our metropolis have called forth the cry of "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," by some new means, and some means quicker than the old; when even cremation has come within the bounds of possibility, surely the Parsee mode of burial will commend itself to many foreseeing minds. True that we do not like to think of the vultures hovering around the funeral procession for the last few miles, nor of others awaiting it, perched on, and greedily gazing down into, the tower ”

“ In any country where cremation is practised, it is only when there is absolutely no property whatsoever that burning is omitted. For instance, a Zaisaugh amongst the Kalmucks, whose property will pay for a proper offering, can have his dead body burnt, and only the utterly poor are buried or abandoned. ”

“ Besides human and animal remains, I think all garbage should be destroyed by fire.
The idea of cremation which, carried by the wings of enthusiasm, traversed the whole civilized world in the spring of 1874, is really naught but a demand of hygiene in favor of our own health. Not only physicians, but also laymen, should enter the arena where the great fight between earth-burial and cremation is going on, and combat for glorious incineration. ”

“ In some cemeteries corpses are allowed to remain in a grave only a stipulated time; in English burial-grounds, where a freehold right is not secured, the remains may rest undisturbed but seven, in France five, years. ”

“ But if we are to follow the prototype so closely, why do we practise burial in the earth? And why do we not lay our dead in roomy sepulchres? [14] I have perused most, if not all, of the religious objections which have been urged against cremation, and I humbly say that they appear to me to be outside the pale of argument altogether. They rank only as very respectable crotchets, and never rise above mere sentiment. The truth is, that the question of burying the dead or of burning them ought never to have been made, if ever it has seriously been made, a religious question. ”

“ C. W. Purdy, of Chicago, Ill., says: “Burial-grounds are unquestionably ruinous to health, as both theory and facts amply demonstrate; many sections of population suffer annually disease and death which are exposed to their influences; all engaged in this unwholesome system suffer—the grave-diggers, the gardeners, the men who repair the vaults and tombstones, the friends who visit the graves, and the whole funeral procession are exposed directly. There is no redeeming 128feature about this burial system, degrading to the dead and dangerous to the living.” ”

“ They forget how they drank well-water, the springs of which percolated through peaceful village graveyards. Man’s worst enemies are his own superstition and ignorance.
“I learned by terrible experience when very young the horrors of earth burial. I now know its crime against the living.”
Miss Field is not only converted to but convinced of incineration, convinced that it is preferable to any other method; the moment a cremation society was incorporated in New York, she became a member. ”

“ It has been also a subject of regret to me that their remains lie so far off. I care little for the fate which happens to their bodies; and yet, had such a practice as cremation 220been in use, it would sometimes have been a comfort to feel that I had their ashes with me. Collected in an urn, they might either repose in columbaria, like those at Rome, or in a mortuary chapel in my own house. ”

“ The Fourth Medical Congress held at Milan on the 5th of September, 1877, endorsed cremation, stating that it is a veritable scientific progress which has the advantage over inhumation in corresponding to the exigencies of hygiene. It also expressed its conviction that incineration in no way offends against the affection of families for their defunct, the respect and veneration for human remains, and the religions principles of the surviving. ”

“ I rejoice at the thought that most writers on the momentous subject of incineration were medical men. Who, indeed, would be better qualified for such a task than the man who may daily witness the pernicious effect which the dead exercise over the living.
Those who are friends of the reform should come out openly in its favor. Crematists who are on the fence, or who, perhaps, hide back of it, might just as well keep out of the combat between cremation and interment altogether; we have no use for them. If you believe in cremation, candidly say so, and tell your friends why you believe in it. ”

“ The tombs are almost universally made of brick, and whitewashed. They vary in size from 3 × 6 feet to 10 × 10 feet or 10 × 20 feet; there is a post in the centre, which is surrounded by shelves, on which the body—that is, the coffin—is deposited. There the dead rests for about a year, when it becomes necessary to use the tomb for another corpse; then the remains of the preceding occupant of the vault are rudely taken from the casket and dashed head over heels into a pit, where they are left to breed disease. ”

“ The people of Burmah cremate their rich dead, and inhume the poor or consign them to a stream. Persons of rank are embalmed before incineration, and placed on exhibition in a convent or temple for six weeks. At the funeral, the body is borne in a coffin on the shoulders of men, who are preceded by female mourners chanting an epicede. The corpse is followed by the relatives. When the slowly moving train arrives at the pyre, which is commonly six or eight feet high, the remains are placed upon it; the wood of the funeral pile is generally laid crosswise, to bring about a stronger draught of air. ”