is to be hoped they do not find it very unwholesome. Let us hope, too, that the bone-dust which our bakers mix in our bread may not be derived from “dead men’s bones.”
Among the Hindoos the river Ganges is the place of sepulture, when it is within reach; the mud along the banks being the sick-chamber. In this case the jackals and adjutants (not the military adjutants, however), take the place of the kites and dogs of Tartary, as the last resting-place of the deceased. Crocodiles were sometimes employed for the interment of children. Towards the south cremation is usually adopted. If, as sometimes happens, the quantity of wood be deficient, those who live or happen to be passing at the lee side of a burning-ground when a body is being burned, have good reason to wish that the practice of decent committal to “mother earth” were universally prevalent.
The notion that fire was the chief element, and the source of nature and life, probably influenced, if it did not introduce, the practice of cremation. However this may be, to burn the corpse has been for many ages the aristocratic, and emphatically the “right thing to do” with it, even in those places where other modes of disposing of bodies were adopted, and when no particular veneration was paid to fire as a chief element. The Romans both burned and buried. Slaves were buried—in a mean way, perhaps to avoid the expense of burning them. The Jews sometimes embalmed their dead, and sometimes burned them, as in the case of the body of Saul. This monarch’s early bravery probably secured that honour for his remains. The Greeks burned, buried, and embalmed. This last custom was borrowed from Egypt, but it was not carried out quite in the same way; and the learned in mummies can readily notice the difference between a Grecian and an Egyptian.
In all these various modes, however, we can trace, if not in all cases formal respect for the dead body, yet an entire absence of everything approaching to intentional disrespect; indeed, the mutilation of the dead has been always held as an act of fiendish barbarity. If the kites, crows, or dogs got a meal, those animals were supposed to contain the souls of ancestors; and to clothe those souls in human flesh again was a respectful,—a graceful act. Whether a dead body were wrapped in shrouds, or the bark of a tree, and laid in a canoe set on stakes; or the bones denuded of the flesh were carefully preserved and transferred from place to place, either to rest in an ancestral sepulchre, or with the bones of a husband or wife in a new settlement, that kind attention was prompted by motives of respectful regard. We cannot, then, boast much of our progress in this direction, in the much-vaunted nineteenth century, when a savage mob of frenzied Celts, without decency or religious feelings, do their utmost to mutilate the prostrate body of a dying man in the streets of a great city.
In the selection of a place of interment men have different tastes. Attila was laid in a grave under the bed of a running stream; Napoleon in a splendid mausoleum in the Invalides; Mr. Howard, with republican simplicity, has elected to be buried “under the pavement.” No doubt he would reject the idea of being trampled upon in any sense during his life-time; and we wish him a more peaceful resting place than he would find probably “under the pavement,” where gas-pipes and water-pipes might seriously interfere with the proper relative position of his bones.
DRESS AND THE AGE.
Croquet: see next page.
PART II.
