CHAPTER I. PAGE THE HISTORY OF CREMATION 1 CHAPTER II. THE EVILS OF BURIAL; THE SANITARY ASPECT OF INCINERATION 66 CHAPTER III. CREMATION IN TIMES OF WAR 129 CHAPTER IV. THE PROCESSES OF MODERN CREMATION 140 CHAPTER V. THE MEDICO-LEGAL ASPECT OF INCINERATION.—THE OBJECTIONS TO 157 CREMATION CHAPTER VI. BURIAL ALIVE.—CREMATION FROM AN ÆSTHETIC AND RELIGIOUS POINT OF 180 VIEW CHAPTER VII. THE ECONOMY OF CREMATING THE DEAD.—THE PRESENT STATE OF THE 224 CREMATION QUESTION INTRODUCTION. DR. H. ERICHSEN: _Dear Sir_,—In reply to your request that I should write an introduction to a work which you are about to compose on cremation, I am placed in the great difficulty of knowing nothing of your book, not even having seen its title-page or table of contents. It is quite impossible, therefore, for me to say how far your views and my own may accord. But, as I suppose your object is to bring before the people of America proof of the evil effects to the living inseparable from the present mode of disposal of the dead by burying them in the earth, as well as to show how these evils may be avoided by burning dead bodies,—in a word, by the substitution of cremation for burial, of purification for putrefaction,—I have great pleasure in doing the little that is in my power to assist in bringing a very important question of sanitary reform before a thoughtful, intelligent, and advancing nation. I do not know how far I am right in supposing that with you in the West, as with us in the East, a knowledge of sanitary science, of the conditions which are necessary for the health of mankind, is still confined to the comparatively few who may be called the well educated class. Nor do I know how far this knowledge has been diffused among the classes of your population who have received but little education. But I do know with us it is the highest classes, in the sense of the best educated classes, who are the most earnest in their efforts to disseminate that branch of knowledge or science which, in the words of _Parkes_, aims at rendering “youth most perfect, decay less rapid, life more vigorous, and death more remote.” _Parkes_ is dead, but he still speaks to us by his book, and he says:—