CREMATION.

Thames Star, Volume VI, Issue 1789, 26 September 1874, Page 3

CREMATION.

COOL CONSIDERATION OF A HOT

SUBJECT,

I hardly think, upon the whole, that I am in favour of cremation. The process seems tome to be so frightfully wasteful. At the same time, lam ready to admit that the dead might be used much more profitably than they are now. If a man must be buried, let him be planted where.he will make something grow. I remember that Casselbenny of Vineland, New Jersey, once laid his mother in under his grape vine, and by carefully watering her twice a day he secured a crop of fifteen bushels of Black Hamburgs. The subject came up in the Agricultural Society subsequently, and there was a question whether a grandmother was the only female relative that could be efficaciously used, and whether it should be a paternal or maternal grandmother. Casselbenny explained that he had known a maiden aunt or second cousin to do equally as well, and he had his stepfather among the roots of his mammoth gooseberry bush, with every prospect of a superb crop. Very particular inquiries were made by several members concerning the availability of mothers-in-law, and a man named Johnson said he had been married four times, and had used all his mothers-in-law in improving the asparagus bed; he took the first prize for asparagus at eight country fairs. Then the meeting suddenly adjourned, and fifteen mothers-in-law in Vineland died during the succeeding week. And then there is the skeletons* The Esquimaux make skates .out of the collar-bones,of their departed friends, and I remember that Hufnagle,of Mauch. Chunk, having lost his leg by a railway accident, took out the bone and had it made up into a clarionet, with which lie used to go round serenading a woman who refused to love him. He alwayi played in a minor key, and they say up at Mauch Chunk, that he whistled *he most heartrending music out of that bone. When old Mackintosh of Darby died, his widow had his framework taken out, and she worked the whole of it, up into knife handles and trouser buttons, which she gave to her second husband when they were married. The hottest kind of water never hurt those knives, and the suspenders that wouldn't stay buttoned on those .buttons were admitted by everybody to-be "just no. suspenders at all. But I admit there something diyagreeble about this form of utilisation, and therefore I rather incline to favour the plan of turning inanimate remains into illuminating

gas by consuming them in a retort. This, I understand, is practicable; and it would be, I should think, inexpressibly consoling to a man to sit and read the paper comfortably by the light of his deceased uncle, and to have the satisfaction of knowing that the said relative had not been run through a metre at so much a , thousand feet. It would be beautiful to illuminate the parlour with a departed hired girl, or to turn off your half-brother before going to bed. And think what splendid gas a Congressman would make. We might have a law apfropriating dead Congressmen to the light House Board for use on the coast. This class of persons would then have th« consolation of knowing that they would be much more useful after death than they are during life.—Danbury News.