show of them as here, why, I can only say that cremation will gain a good many converts. Any one would prefer urn burial to the chance of being thus made a spectacle. So good, too, it must be for the rising population to take off the edge of any salutary horror they may feel at death and decay, or of reverence for the dead.” There are many such shows where the human corpse is used for the purpose of eliciting money from a public loving horrible and sensational sights. I need but mention the catacombs of Rome, or the Bleikeller of Bremen, to conjure up before your mind all the terrible scenes which the clerical and medical gentlemen whom I have just cited have pictured. There is another way in which the dead are insulted, another mode by which their graves are desecrated. The monuments which are erected upon the last resting-place of the deceased to perpetuate their memory are sometimes moved about till they no longer mark the spot where the person whose name they bear was interred. Here, then, all the good intentions of friends are set at naught; their expense, their attention, is all in vain. The tombstones are moved, and when they become yellow with age they are broken up to act as headstones for some public highway. That this does not hold good of European countries only, but also of American ones, is proven by our honored and beloved “autocrat of the breakfast table,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, who declares: “The most accursed act of vandalism ever committed within my knowledge was the uprooting of the ancient gravestones in three at least of our city burial-grounds, and one at least just outside the city, and planting them in rows to suit the taste for symmetry of the perpetrators. The stones have been shuffled about like chessmen, and nothing short of the Day of Judgment will tell whose dust lies beneath any of those records meant by affection to mark one small spot as sacred to some cherished memory. Shame! shame! shame! That is all I can say. It was on public thoroughfares, under the eye of authority, that this infamy was enacted. I should like to see the gravestones which have been disturbed or removed and the ground levelled, leaving the flat tombstones. Epitaphs were never famous for truth, but the old reproach of ‘Here _lies_’ never had such a wholesale illustration as in these outraged burial-places, where the stone does lie above, and the bones do not lie beneath.” Now be candid! Do you not think that facts like these go a good way to endorse cremation? There would be no need of disturbing the dead, there would be no vulgar exhibition of the deceased, after incineration would have been introduced. There would, in fact, be nothing to do violence to that most sacred and deep-rooted feeling of humanity,—respect for the dead.