“The old form of interment was gradually superseded by cremation for a number of reasons; the principal one is that cremation offers greater security to the living. An interred body, having died from the effects of a contagious disease, may, under certain conditions, easily spread the disease or contagion; while a cremated one can not. The atom of the contagious corpse, after dissolution by combustion, is no more dangerous to life, as far as we know, than the atom from a decomposed corpse having died from old age. It is true that contagious diseases are almost unknown with us, but a careful guard against them on all sides, and other favorable conditions, has made it so. Display, unnecessary contact and carelessness in disposing of the dead has cost us and you an untold number of lives, and you are paying dearly for it still. “Our obsequies are the simplest possible; in fact, I think you would call them no obsequies at all. As soon as a physician has notified the undertakers or cremators of the death of a person, they take the corpse with their motor-hearse to the crematorium. No one except the cremators follows the corpse to his final place of dissolution; for it can not be the desire of a highly cultivated being, who has the highest welfare and greatest happiness of his friends and companions at heart, to have them follow his senseless corpse, when such an act can not conduce to his personal happiness; when it involves nothing but unproductive and destructive labor. A funeral procession also tends to spread contagious diseases, and prolong the mournful and depressed feelings caused by the death of a dear friend. No one who clearly sees these and other evils can consistently desire his surviving friends to follow him in a funeral procession. Our aid and sympathy are always with the _living_, for death has satisfied, at least, all the material and mental wants of the deceased, and these are all the wants we have any positive knowledge of. “Let us examine this from another point of view. From historical records, and from the present practices of savages, we find that funeral rites and processions are born in barbarous times, and first practiced by primitive savages, and that all you have left of them at present are only the modified remnants of former barbarity and superstition. “The primitive savage worships his deceased ancestors; he embalms them; he assigns them the best place at the table during the time of a feast; he often inters his horse, his gun and a number of slaves with him. His wife has often such a profound ‘respect’ for the dead that she often voluntarily cremates herself alive on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. “Thus we see at a glance that the savage has a much profounder respect for the dead, and much less respect for the living than the more cultivated person has, and this change gradually continues until all our help and sympathies are with the living, for the dead can not utilize them.