work I refer the reader. For instance, a series of pendulum observations at or near the Pole would be of service in determining the true figure of the earth. The nearest point to the Pole at which the pendulum has been swung for geodetical purposes is 600 miles from that point, and yet Sir Edward Sabine's observations are those which we chiefly rely upon for our knowledge of the earth's figure towards its northern termination. Terrestrial magnetism, and the study of the aurora by spectrum analysis, will yield good results-perhaps entirely new. The meteorology, the temperature of the sea at different depths, the nature of the currents, are all important subjects, and may be advanced by the researches of the officers of this expedition.

Finally, additions to our knowledge of the ethnology of the far North may be advanced by a study of the few remnants of the Eskimo now living in Smith's Sound, by an investigation of their kjokkenmöddings, or refuse heaps and grave mounds,* their wanderings, &c. It may be found, though this is not probable, that detached tribes may be found still higher North than we yet know, and I think it is not improbable that the Eskimo of the east coast of Greenland doubled with the lemming and the musk of the northern extremity of the continent, and then spread to the south. In this case it would be interesting to compare the remains, implements, &c., of Smith's Sound with those of the east coast, brought home by the German expedition, or contained in the Ethnological Museum in Copenhagen.

Elaborate instructions will no doubt be supplied to the naturalists regarding all of these questions.† It is to be hoped that they, like the commander, will not be hampered by too many instructions prepared by naturalists, who, however eminent, may be unaware of the difficulties which a naturalist has to meet with in his researches in such a region. If they are

qualified-as doubtless they are-for the duties, then they may be safely left to do what they can. If they are not qualified, then for the credit of English science they had better be left. at home. No one, however, who knows the stuff out of which the expedition is composed, will ever hesitate in believing that— though such an expedition is to a great extent at the beck of the ice, and a hundred other circumstances which those who have never sailed the ice-choked seas of the North can have little conception of every man will do his best; and the best will be very good indeed.

It has been found that the iron which faces the old bone knives found in the old Eskimo graves in Greenland is meteoric.

† Arctic Committees of the Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society, at the suggestion of Mr. Markham, are now preparing manuals, giving a summary of our knowledge of Greenland.

164

ON THE DISPOSAL OF THE DEAD.

BY DR. RICHARDSON, F.R.S.

THE

HE recent discussion on cremation has, for a moment, excited much public interest on the whole subject of disposal of the dead. The subject is one fruitful for discussion, and one that will probably long remain fruitful, not because of the practical difficulties of modes of disposal, but because of the differences of sentiment that prevail, and of the social, and I may say legal objections to that mode which many men of science, dealing only with the scientific side of the question, are inclined to consider as the method most perfect and most advantageous to the physical interests of society.

In studying this subject in a practical point of view, men of science have to take into their consideration the psychological not less than the material side of it. That they will by any force of enactment make any one exclusive method universal is not to be expected. They might as well hope to introduce one. religion, or one taste, or one food, or one sentiment, and give to that unit universal rule in communities, the members of which are more sharply divided by psychological differences than by any other causes of division common to mankind.

To bury, to embalm, to cremate, mean in fact three acts the inclination to either of which depends altogether upon the disposition of those who have to carry the acts into practice. This disposition depends not on reasoning, but on instinct. This instinct depends not on accident, but on the most veritable of all human endowments, on the organic origin and build of the man and of the men from whom the man springs; in other words, upon racial and family dispositions or qualities.

It accorded with the disposition of the ancient Greek to burn his dead. For the Greek was the father of mirth, and it was never in his happy mind to retain long near to him that which would hold him in gloom. So to the eternal fire must go the nearest and the dearest when the spirit that animated the body was resolved away. Burial of the dead was to his mind a slow and even wearisome process, to be followed out only in emer

gency. The traveller who should find a dead body was asked to bury it, or at least three times to cast dust upon it:

Quanquam festinas, non est mora longa, licebit
Injecto ter pulvere, curras.

And the sailor who floated ashore from the sea bore on his body the most costly gift he possessed for him who should give its lifeless bearer the rite of burial. But these acts were exceptional, the necessities inflicted upon those who could not be submitted to the pyre.

Beyond this reason, moreover, the Greek found and felt another motive for that system of cremation he all but universally practised. Strange as it might seem to men of other races, the very process of submitting the body to be burned was to him the sign of the life that is immortal. The body he with so much ceremonial committed to the fire was not in his ideal destroyed. Great men, according to that ideal, were to be raised to the world of the higher intelligences; and Pluto himself, because he taught the very art of disposal of the dead, was, for his art, believed to have been received into the number of the gods. No! the thought that animated the Greek was the simple reverse of the material conception of organic structure,. living or dead. The men who transformed their heroes intodivinities, and who carried out their young dead to the pile before the dawn, that the sun might not be the witness of so terrible a calamity as the cessation of life while yet it had not approached its perfected glory, were hardly the men to be tainted with the belief of the cessation of individual phenomena with the cessation of that visible motion from which we infer that the body that once was living has ceased to live. With the Greek, the burning, to which he subjected the dead body, was a process for the purification of the soul. The soul, left unclean in its earthly state, required to be rendered quite perfect by the absolute purification even of the casement in which it had been enshrined during its mortal course, and to which it must still cling. So they submitted the casement to the pur, the great and absolute purifier, the fire. Further, they conceived that in this purification they set free the indestructible principle of life, that it might enter the more speedily into the domains of the blessed. This was the Greek ideal of what we call cremation. Symbolised, somewhat differently, it remains to this day connected with a faith to which millions pay allegiance.

It accorded with the disposition of the ancient Egyptian to retain his dead as perfectly as art could enable him. The body, the receptacle of the soul, was too precious to be cast away to the earth to rot there, or to the sea to be devoured of animals,

or to the fire to be resolved into thin air. It was to be held so that the spirit which once animated it might at some strange and eventful moment re-enter its tabernacle and reign in it again, incorruptible. In this ideal we have the origin of a belief which is still most prominent in the thoughts of mankind a root of a faith symbolised specially, and accepted also by millions of men. In our care of burial of the dead, in our sepulchres and stately tombs, we strive to express what the heart prompts from this source. The ideal received its fullest recognition in the process of disposal of the dead by embalming. The poorest and the richest Egyptian preserved his dead, in this hope, with all the perfection his means could devise. The rich man with his costly gifts left his lifeless friend in the hands of the embalmer for seventy days, and received back the body swathed in cloth and gum, so perfectly prepared, that set up amongst the living or laid in the sarcophagus of all but solid stone, it could be left safe there for all the ages that were to come; left, not dead, but waiting in solemn silence for the renewal of life that would one day as surely revive it as the sun revives the silent earth into the living day.

When father Abraham, refusing the gift, bought of Ephron the Hittite for four hundred shekels of silver the field before Mamre, that he might bury his dead out of his sight in the cave of Machpelah, he followed another disposal of the dead which, through all the variations of the marvellous race he founded, has held its course. To the Greek this mere burial were barbarous; to the Egyptian a poor imitation of that perpetuation of mortality by which the mortal would be made to rejoin the immortal part. Yet again it symbolised, in another way, the same ideal. The seed sown in the ground is buried, but does it not spring up again? That which is sown is not quickened unless it die. And so with the body: it is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption: it is sown a natural, it is raised a spiritual body. How fixedly this principle of burying in the earth, of returning to the earth that which came from it, has remained rooted in the minds of men, through Jewish interpretation, let any thinking person consider. The masses cling to it despite pictures of disgust, however realistic ; and even the choicest of our philosophers have held by it to their final sleep, and have written of it themselves.

"The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer, (like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding) lies here food for worms. Yet the work itself shall not be lost, for it will (as he believed) appear once more in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the Author."

In these later days the disposal of the dead has been consi

dered more purely as a scientific question. It has come scientifically into notice in connection with the work of sanitary advancement, and upon this basis it has been discussed with much activity. Growing out of the discussion has arisen an effort to introduce into our country the ancient Greek and later Roman method of cremation, but without reference to that sentiment by which the cultivated Greek made the process a solemnity and a hope. It is the design of our modern cremation to accomplish a destruction, not to institute a rite: to get rid as quickly as possible of an offensive and objectionable mass of organic putridity, not to consign for perpetuity the unmatchable mechanism of life, in its design indestructible, that it may exist again.

In this proposal of modern times there is a return to a philosophy of a Roman school which once had many followers; but which, failing to appeal to the heart of man, fell before the gentler and sympathetic part of the mental organisation. I believe it will fall so again and again, unless in the course of nature the two nervous lives with which we are endowed should be organically remodelled, and the reasoning parts gain the pre-eminence, the head overcome the heart. But then the passions will one and all be lost, and the cold reasoning being -he will be no longer an animal-that will remain will have no sentiments and therefore no sympathies; no uncertainties, therefore no hopes; no hates, therefore no loves; and no gratifications except those that are infinite and away from the common sphere in which he is doomed to breathe his purely physical life. There is little indication up to the present moment of any such radical reorganisation of man as this, and we need not expect the cremationists much chance in our generation. Indeed they are out-voted a hundred to one by the extreme sentimentalists, who would still embalm their dead and retain near them even the silent form of that which, after it became silent, was felt to be beyond all previous conception beloved and precious. I have myself seen many instances of embalmment; I believe there is no mode of disposal of the dead that is so tranquillising and solacing, at the moment, to the living; and I am far more prepared to see the advancement of this mode of disposal of the dead than of that by the sharp and decisive fire.

The probabilities are that, on the whole, matters will long remain much as they exist at the present moment. The majority will hold by the present system of simple interment in the earth; a minority will follow the process of embalming; a smaller minority will support cremation. Putting aside all feeling in the matter, it may be useful to consider what disadvantages or advantages pertain to each method.