“A furnace fire is built and kept burning for 20 or 30 hours before the cremation is to take place. Immediately above the fire is placed in a horizontal position a cylinder of clay called the incinerator, three feet in diameter by seven feet long. This fire-clay incinerator, the walls of which are from one to two inches thick, receives to itself the intense heat of the fire below, but does not admit the flames. The consequence is that the body, when placed in the incinerator, is not, in a proper sense of the word, burned. It is reduced to ashes by the chemical application of intense heat. Gases are driven off or absorbed, and being carried down into the fire from the incinerator and led back and forth 25 feet through its flames, are utterly consumed. Even the smoke of the fire is consumed, and nothing can be seen issuing from the chimney but the quiver of the heat. The process might be called, as we have said, the spiritualization of the body, the etherealization or sublimation of its material parts. “When the incinerator has been raised to a white heat, it is ready for the reception of the remains. As the cover is removed from its mouth, the in-rushing air cools it from a white to a red heat, and the whole inner surface is filled with a beautiful rosy light which is fascinating to the eye. It looks like the blush of dawn upon the sky, or like the exquisite tints which sometimes flicker along the aurora borealis. There is nothing repulsive about it, and nothing, as has been said, to suggest the idea of fire except the intense heat. “The body, being decently clad for burial and tenderly laid in the crib provided for the purpose, is wholly covered with a clean, white sheet which has been dipped in a solution of alum. The effect of this is to entirely prevent smoke or fumes or flame, which would otherwise arise from putting anything inflammable into the midst of such a heat; but, under its protection, even the extraordinary heat of the incinerator does not produce upon the body the appearance of scorching or smoking or anything of the sort. There is no such impression as that of burning made upon the eye. The sheet, saturated with alum, retains its original position over the crib, and conceals the entire form until nothing but the bones are left; and when the eye first rests upon the remains after they are left in the rosy light of the cylinder, it sees nothing but these bones gently crumbling away into dust under the mystic touch of an invisible agent, whose only appearance to the eye is like the tremor of the northern lights in the sky; or, more exactly, the radiation of heat from the earth beneath the summer’s sun.