“Any unprejudiced mind needs but little time to reflect in forming a conclusion as to which is the better method of disposing of the body. Common sense and reason proclaim in favor of cremation. There is no reason for keeping up the burial custom, but many against it; some of the most practical of which are but too recently developed to need mention. There is nothing repulsive in the idea of cremation. People’s prejudice is the only opponent it has. If they could be awakened to a sense of the horror of crowding thousands of bodies under the ground, to pollute in many instances the air we breathe and the water we drink, their prejudice would be overcome; cremation would be taken for what it truly is—a beautiful method of disposing of the body. The friends of the departed can do as they please with the remains. Take the ashes of a wife or daughter and put them in an urn; place it on your mantelpiece, or in as private a place as you please. Strew them on the ground if you like, and let them assist in bringing forth a blade of grass. This would be an advantage over the burial method, where human bodies only cumber the ground.” This was said by a man who not only showed considerable ability as an operator, and writer on topics of medicine, but who also was honored by the famous universities of Cambridge and Oxford, receiving from them academical titles never conferred except upon the most distinguished. We will take a spade (only metaphorically, of course) and investigate the narrow pit which serves to hold all that is mortal of man after the spark of life has extinguished. Now we remove the plants, the clinging vines, the blooming flowrets. We throw the earth aside and finally lay bare a coffin. A coffin? Something that must have been one in the remote past. A sickening odor greets us. We step back to draw a breath of pure air. At last we muster up sufficient courage to return to the grave. A touch of the spade causes the top-board of the box to fall to pieces, and there is revealed to the sight a spectacle that is horrible. The ground around the body has been moist and non-porous; what has remained of the corpse is only a mass of foul flesh in a state of putrefaction. Is there anything more disgusting than such a sight? Shakespeare says in “As You Like It”:— “And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale.”