In 1882, M. Casimir-Perier, then minister, proposed a law granting to every person who had attained his majority and to every minor who had been relieved from guardianship, the power to regulate all the details of his own funeral at his own discretion. The _Société pour la Propagation de l'Incinération_, which now includes six hundred members, had been founded two years before by M. Kœchlin-Schwartz and M. Georges-Salomon, and this society caused to be erected, in Père-Lachaise, in 1887, on the plans of the architect Formigé, a building destined for the cremation of dead bodies,--this process, it was declared by the _Conseil d'Hygiène et de Salubrité de la Seine_, on the proposal of Doctor Bourneville, could be applied to the disposal of subjects from the dissecting-tables without any menace to the public health, provided that it was effected in suitable furnaces and without emitting any odor. M. Casimir-Perier's proposal was finally recognized by the Chamber and the Senate in 1886 and 1887, and this legal sanction decided the question practically in favor of the Cremation Society and of the Conseil Municipal of Paris, which had long been in favor of the optional incineration of the dead. The first apparatus, a reverberatory furnace burning wood, was found to be entirely insufficient, and was replaced by a chamber of combustion filled with incandescent gas, much more elaborate in construction. A special apparatus, called a _Gazogène_, evolves carbon protoxide, which, set on fire by peculiar burners, produces a temperature of eight hundred degrees Centigrade in the chamber of combustion. The entire arrangement at Père-Lachaise is some nine mètres in height by five and a half in width, the actual furnace is below the chamber of combustion and not directly under it, this space being occupied by long, perpendicular flues through which the air--fed through a large horizontal shaft passing under the furnace--rises. In the chamber of combustion, into which the body is introduced in its coffin, the destruction was formerly effected by the aid of the actual flames, and the result was not completely satisfactory,--the skull was left almost intact and some of the bones, with a few fatty acids and salts. The attendants gathered these remnants up with pinchers, brushed the black and greasy residue from the bones, and placed the whole in a little wooden casket, about the size of a child's coffin, for final deposit in the columbarium. Now, by the improved process, the total residue that issues from the furnace is a quantity of white ashes, varying from nine hundred to twelve hundred grammes in weight, although the flame is no longer permitted to reach the body and the combustion is effected by refraction alone. A curious detail in both operations is that the liver is the last of the organs to be destroyed, and remains an incandescent mass when all the rest of the body has disappeared.