Mr. Seymour-Haden wrote to the Times of Tuesday a very
powerful protest against the usual practice of burial in coffins. The true remedy, he says, for the poison which our modern graveyards and cemeteries diffuse is not cremation, but to bury the body without any durable protecting medium between it and the earth. The earth is the great antiseptic. A body buried in the earth will not only be all assimilated to the earth in the course of four or five years, and reduced to a few fragments of bone, but in the meantime there will have been no accumulation of poisonous gas and decomposing fluids. It is the protection of the coffin, and that alone, which prevents the earth from so combining at once with the decomposing elements of the body as to prevent all putridity; indeed, it is the action of the air in the coffin which sets these dangerous gases and liquids free, and if the body were buried before decomposition sets in, in a winding-sheet without a coffin, the earth would do even more effectually all that is expected of fire in the painful and repulsive process of cremation. That seems to us very sound advice. It may need a great wrench to the English people, with their tenacious customs, to get rid of coffins and to bury within a day or two of death ; but it would be a far less wrench than cremation, and some sacrifice of feeling is certainly due to the health of posterity.
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