In both ancient Greece and Rome the dwelling-house was made the repository of the funeral urns; at all events, the practice was carried on for a very long period. The Thebans at one time had a law that no one should build a house without a specific repository for the dead.[32] It is possible that private mausoleums could with due decency be attached to ancestral mansions in our country,[33] but such cases will necessarily be rare. Even then they should be subjected to proper supervision. It would most certainly prove unseemly for the poorer classes to place them, as has been mooted, in their residences, subject to all the inconveniences of removal and other easily imagined drawbacks. Disrespect and irreverence only could follow such a recommendation. The Theban regulation just adverted to proves that the heathens, as they are called, were not to be charged with any lack of respect to their departed dead. On the contrary, the most tender sentiments are wound round the practice of cremation. Hercules is reported to have burnt the body of Argius, because only in this way could he return the son to a sorrowing father.[34] Nay, in some cases the reverence for the dead became transcendental, and the rites of cremation were carried to such an extent that the funeral pile was shapen like an altar, and bedewed with wine and incense. This, however, was in the decadence of the nation. Nor was this all, for sometimes an altar called an _acerra_ was afterwards built before the sepulchre. [32] Potter. [33] See Plate V. [34] Jamieson. These few remarks upon the cremation of human bodies have as yet referred only to those which have succumbed to the ordinary evils of life; but I cannot forbear recording my conviction that it would be wise in the stricken field to have recourse to the practice. During the sittings of the recent International Sanitary Congress a paper was read by Professor Reclam of Leipzic, in which he most strongly urged the adoption of cremation after destructive battles. He described a new portable burning apparatus capable of reducing the carcase of a horse to ashes within two hours, and at a cost of four shillings' worth of fuel. He moreover declared that the dead, both men and horses, left on the battlefield of Gravelotte might have been by the aid of such machinery reduced to 'a harmless heap of white ashes in four days.' One thing is certain: science, which invented the mitrailleuse, could easily devise a proper apparatus.[35] [35] Mr. Hemsworth has suggested an apparatus for the purpose.