The Americans think they can improve greatly upon cremation, which,
with all its recommendations, hurts the general feeling, and consequently does not spread so rapidly as it should. Their latest idea is that if the dead body were placed in a mould, something like the mould used for metal castings, and the space filled with fluid concrete, the corpse could be put away wherever it was most convenient—say, in a gradually rising pyramid—without inconvenience, and at a very low general rate of expense. That is not a bad suggestion ; but then, in- stead of building a pyramid which would soon tower above the city, and not increase its cheerfulness, why not set aside a field for the concreted corpses ? And if we could introduce into the concrete some destructive agency, so that the corpses should fertilise it, and restore to earth what they have taken from it, would not that be an improvement? Most American inventors would say " Yes " to both propositions, probably without being aware that they would simply have restored the practice of burial with a stone coffin instead of a wooden one. Nothing can surpass the antiseptic power of the earth, or its ultimate capacity of destruction ; and the new suggestions are all either based on hurry, or on a notion that dead bodies should be kept for some lengthened period, the old idea of embalming. If we could leave the present system alone, but provide for carrying it out more perfectly, so that the poor, for example, should always be buried reverently, we should save some thought and a great deal of laceration of feeling.
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