1882 Scrapbook of Newspaper Clippings Vo 1 033

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order of the board of directors. There have
been sold up to the present time 1652
shares of stock."

The crematory which the society is to
build will be a handsome structure, as the
accompanying cut indicates. The feature
which is different from most crematories is
the chamber for the
Preservation of the Urns.
The ceremony of incineration is described
by Mary B. Comyns as always decent and
in order. She says:

"The body, simply clad, and placed in a
coffin, is not put into the fire as many per-
sons suppose, but into a so-called chamber
of clay, little larger than itself, which is
wholly closed except for a few small perfo-
rations in the top for the escape of the
gases, which are conducted through the
tire and consumed. This chamber is heated
to a temperature of about 2000°. Nothing
but heated air touches the body. It lies ab-
solutely undisturbed, maintaining its per-
fect shape until the last moment, when the
beautiful rosy color it has gradually as-
sumed changes to white, and it instantly
falls together in the form of pure ashes.
[Sad?], yes, heart breaking it would be to
watch the process, because anything which
takes from us forever the forms of those we
love is sad and heart breaking; but, when
our dear ones have been buried, is there
ever a moment during those years and
years of terrible changes through which
they pass, when we could bring ourselves
to look upon them?

"The crematory which contains the
heated chamber may be as beautiful as
money and refined taste can make it. The
room in which the religious services are
held, may be as quiet and peaceful as the
chapels in our cemeteries. As the service
is solemn and reverential, so is there
neither carelessness nor levity when the
body is removed to its final resting place.
All is tenderly done for the moment, and
we know that no harm can ever again
come to the forms of those we have loved.
Is it so with inhumation?

"Having freed our minds of all mis-
guided sentiment, we can more calmly
study the effect of burial upon the sur-
vivors. Nor exaggerated feeling for the
dead will distort our sense of
Duty to the Living.
Our reason, unbiassed, will point the way
to save future generations from dangers
most appaling to contemplate."

The Massachusetts law regarding crema-
tion stipulates that five or more people can
associate themselves together in a corpora-
tion fo rtha tpurpose, with a c[a?]pital of not
less than $6000 or more than $50,000. The
bar value of the shares must be either $10
or $50. The corporation can hold property
not exceeding $50,000. The last section of
the law provides that:

No body of a deceased person shall be cremated
within 48 hours after decease unless death was oc-
casioned by contagious or infections disease; and no
body shall be received or cremated by said corpora-
tion until its officers have received the certificate or
burial permit required by law before burial, together
with a certificate from the medical examiner of the
district within which the death occurred that he has
viewed the body and made personal inquiry into the
cause and manner of death, and is of opinion that
no further examination or judicial inquiry concern-
ing the same is necessary.

The society has the benefit of many dis-
tinguished names. The following are the
officers:

James R. Chadwick, president, 270 Clarendon
street; Stephen Salisbury, vice-president, Worcester;
John Homans, 2d, clerk, 184 Marlboro street; John
Ritchie, treasurer, 10 Mt. Vernon street.
[Temporary?] vice presidents - Edward H. Hall, Cam-
bridge; Charles W. E of Cambridge; Francis J.
Child, Cambridge; Francis Parkman, Boston; Mar-
tin Brimmer, Boston; Miss Katherine P. Loring,
Boston; Miss Mary B. Comyns, Boston; John
Storer Cobb, Boston; Phillips Brooks, Boston;
Samson R. Urbino, Auburndale; directors,
James R. Chadwick, 270 Clarendon street;
Stephen Salisbury of Worcester, Mass.; John
O. [Marble?] of Worcester, Mass.; Augustus Hemen-
way, 91 Marlboro street; Henry P. Bowditch, Ja-
maica Plain; Babson S. Ladd, 10 Tremont street;
Russell Sturgis, Jr., 190 Marlboro street; Mrs. Will-
iam B. Rogers, 117 Marlboro street, and Miss Alice
M. Longfellow, Cambridge.

CITIES OF THE DEAD.
-
The Growth of Mt. Auburn,
Forest Hills and Mt. Hope.
-
How They Illustrate Modern Methods
of Burial-Sanitary Precautions in
the Interest of the Living-Crema-
tion Practised Abroad, but Not Pop-
ular in the United States.

In Boston, as in all other communities
which have had dead to take care of, the
gravedigger began his work within urban
limits, and only later, through stress of pop-
ulation, migrated to the outskirts of the city.
How this practice of intra-urban burial arose
constitutes an important chapter in the his-
tory of interment. It is well known that the
ancients were especially careful not to bury
within their cities, and this exclusion of the
dead from populous communities is to this
day practised even by savages. The chief
burial places of Jerusalem were in the valley
of Jeoshaphat and in the sides of the adja-
cent hills; the Thebans excavated their
graves in the distant mountains, and chose
the borders of a lake for the site of the great
cemetery of Memphis; the Greeks in-
terred their dead in the Ceramicus;
the Romans, prohibited by the 12
tables from intra-urban interment, laid
the bodies or ashes of their departed relatives
along the Appian, Claudian and Flaminian
ways; even the Turks have long used as
their cemetery ground for Constantinople a
part of the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus.
The practice of burying within the city began
in the second century of the present era,
through the Christians being compelled, by
persecution, to worship among their dead in
the catacombs, and the association then estab-
lished between place of worship and place of
interment became thenceforward a feature
of the Christian church. It is thus a sug-
gestive fact that the modern relegation of the
cemetery to the exterior of cities in the inter-
est of public health is simply a return to the
natural precautions taken in disposing of the
dead by the untutored of every age.

Cemeteries, like societies, are growths, and
to sketch how
Modern Burial Grounds,
such as those of Mt. Auburn, Forest Hills
and Mt. Hope became possible, would be to
traverse the whole field of historical ethnol-
ogy. From the tombs of palaeolithic cave
dwellers of France and Belgium, who buried
their dead in crevices of the rock and natural
grottoes, to the stateliest mausoleum ever
sculptured by the American stonecutter-
from the cradle burial of the Indian to the
tower burial of the Parsee, and from the
use of river and sea in the disposal
of bodies to the consumption of them by
fire - the needs and ingenuity of man have
given rise to countless methods of interment.
The commonest mode of burial in every age
has no doubt been that of inhumation, and it
is this form of burial which constitutes the
modern cemetery problem for both Europe
and the new world. Yet even inhumation
varies with varying conditions, nor are re-
strictions imposed upon burial in the earth
the same in every country where it is prac-
tised. In the New Orleans cemeteries, owing
to moisture of the soil, the tombs have to be
placed above ground, most of them being
structures about 8 feet high, and consist-
ing of cells just large enough to
admit a coffin. In some countries
there are restrictions defining the time at
which a grave may be reopened; in others no
such limits are imposed; the Msolem grave
has over it, metaphorically speaking, a per-
petual "touch not on any pretext." The ceme-
tery of the Campo Santo Vecchio in Naples is
remarkable in several ways. It contains 366
deep pits, one of which is opened each day,
and in it all the interments of that day take
place. At night the funeral service is per-
formed; the pit is then filled up with earth
and lime, and can only be reopened a year
later.

In burial grounds like Forest Hills, Mt.
Hope and Mt. Auburn, the modern spirit is
seen in many ways. They contain first of all
not the faintest suggestion of the ancient
churchyard, with its symmetrical rows of
gravestones, from beneath which bones would
now and then peep forth. Where once the
old gloom of the charnel house reigned, "a
laughing light of flowers along the grass is
spread." Under the system of "perpetual
care," the lots are kept green and freshly
blooming, and no faded shrub or withered
wreath is ever permitted to dangle here in
the wind. Nor does the modern cemetery
wear the aspect of a stonecutter's establish-
ment. The monuments that used to rise in
such bewildering frequency, and with such
contempt for surroundings are here re-
duced to order. The partition walls with
which some graves would insist upon
shutting themselves off from others have dis-
appeared; in place of the angularities and
rudenesses, even the positive exclusiveness,
which once isolated tomb from tomb, there
has arisen, out of strife for place and rank, a
fine sense of community of interest, a sweet
spirit of consideration for the symmetry and

neatness of the society of graves as a whole.
In some cases, nevertheless, this sense of
equality has not yet pervaded the entire terri-
tory of the modern cemetery. The city poor
in Mt. Hope, for example, are not yet fairly
provided for; the rows of white stones that
mark the unglorified dead might be tolerated,
but not so easily the manifest neglect of
ground to which Supt. Morton is forced
through sheer lack of funds with which to
grade, level, surface, and do other work that
is needed. Here and there, too, the visitor
sees fluttering feebly from one of
These Neglected Graves
a tattered flag bearing the stars and stripes,
and it flutters there simply because the hero
who sleeps beneath happened to be too poor
to pay for his interment in teh city lot re-
served for the more pecunious soldiers and
sailors who went to the front from Boston.
Perhaps these abandoned poor are just as
well off as the richer dead who sleep beneath
costly monuments; at the same time, it is
well to know that the city fathers are already
considering how they may use some of the
public money in the improvement of the
pauper ground at Mt. Hope, and how, by
simple enlargement of a well-kept plot, all
Boston's veterans at the war may attain even
in death to something of the equality which
they fought for when alive.

Another important advance made by the
modern cemetery relates to the actual care
of the bodies interred - a care directed to the
end of lessening as much as possible those
exhalations which, under faulty methods of
interment, are sure to find their way into the
atmosphere. It is true that under the pres-
ent system of inhumation - burial of bodies,
that is to say, in coffins - absorption of the
decaying elements by the soil is long and in-
juriously delayed. The only rational method
of interment is burial of the body in immedi-
ate contact with the soil, or in some form of
casket which opposes no substantial obsta-
cle to that contact. But, while interment re-
mains as it is, care has to be taken that the
graves shall be deep enough to obviate as far
as possible all chance of noxious mat-
ter escaping into the atmosphere. The
soil in all the three cemeteries named
is carefully prepared for interments by
being frequently turned over with the spade;
the land is drained in accordance with the
most advanced methods; and the possibility
of offensive accumulations of water, that con-
stituted so hideous a feature of the old grave-
yard, has been there completely eliminated.
The graves themselves, in their shape and
structure, have been adapted to sanitary re-
quirements, and where insanitary arrange-
ments have existed it has been the policy of
the trustees to bring about the needed change
as rapidly as possible. In Mt. Auburn, for
example, a number of reinterments were car-
ried out without charge in order to do away
with some old-fashioned tombs that consisted
of a single vault for the reception of coffins,
with a door opening above the surface of the
ground. In giving reasons for this step the
trustees said: "Modern science emphatically
teaches the danger resulting from decompo-
sition and the escape of germs of infectious
diseases, and to this danger neither the pro-
prietors nor the employes of the corporation
ought to be exposed when it can possibly be
avoided."

An important aspect of the life of ceme-
teries as institutions is their growth, and its
relation to the development of the communi-
ties which they serve. Increase in the popu-
lation of Boston's three great cities of the
dead has been literally enormous. Forest
Hills cemetery, for example, consecreated in
1848, nearly doubled its interments in the
course of two decades; by the year 1870,
about 10, 260 bodies had been buried within
its inclosures, representing 22 years of in-
terment; in 1876 this number had risen to
14,545, while at the present time the ceme-
tery contains about 24,000 bodies. The Mt.
Auburn burial ground was consecrated in
1831; 25 years gave it a population of 7235;
in 1862 its interments numbered 10,732, and
in 1873 18,039; the total went up to 22,623
in 1881, and continued to increase until the
present time, when the number of the in-
terred is 27,610. But even these figures are
Left in the Shade
by the statistics of Mt. Hope. Before this
cemetery - first used as such in 1852 - came
under the care of the city, the interments
were few and far between; but after 1858
the number rapidly increased. In the years
1852 and 1853 only 73 bodies were deposited
in the grounds; in 1858 the number of inter-
ments was 605; by 1884 the yearly recep-
tion of bodies had reached 1728. The total
number of persons buried in Mt. Hope is now
over 40,380, as given in the last annual re-
port, including 15,170 private interments,
and 25,210 burials by the city. It is a note-
worthy fact that, for all three cemeteries, the
general average number of interments is
maintained pretty constantly from year to
year - that, in other words, the gradual an-
nual increase is added to a mean which
does not sensibly change, and cer-
tainly does not fluctuate to the ex-
tent of the average mortality for each 12
months. The Forest Hills average for the
year, beginning with about 544 in 1861, was
for a long period maintained at about 600,
and has only in recent years risen to a pretty
constant 700. Mt. Auburn, also beginning
early with 500 interments a year, has main-
tained this general average closely, up to the
present time, when the annual interments
number about 536; from 1863 to 1876 a
tendency manifested itself to increase this
average to 600, 700, and in one case, 800,

but was not sustained, as the interments soon
fell down to their average figure. In the case
of Mr. Hope there have been slight fluctua-
tions in the actual number of burials, from
year to year, and decade to decade, owing to
the character of the interments, yet even
here the increase has been steady from the
beginning.

The three cemeteries thus have a total
population of about 100,000, and, as there is
a constant annual increase in the number of
bodies interred in them, the question of their
capacity to provide for future burial needs is
one of considerable importance. As, more-
over, public opinion becomes more and more
adverse to the maintenance of graveyards
and the burial of the dead within cities, and
even in proximity to habitations on the out-
skirts of great centres of population, the de-
mand made upon strictly rural cemeteries
must increase at an even greater rate than
the increase of mortality. In Mt. Auburn,
Forest Hills and Mt. Hope there still
remain unoccupied large tracts of
ground that are destined for use in
the burials of the future. The pro-
prietors of Forest Hills cemetery have added
to their land from time to time, as the de-
mands made upon it increased. In 1861 they
had 126 acres, augmented to 175 acres in
1871, and to 226 acres in 1876. At the pres-
ent time this cemetery has an acreage of 228.
There is still plenty of room for interments in
the 125 acres which constitute the burying
ground of Mt. Auburn, while at Mt. Hope,
with an acreage of 106, large tracts have not
yet been touched by the gravedigger. Mak-
ing every allowance, it may be said that in
any of these three cemeteries there is land
enough to provide for the interments of the
next 10, 20, or even 40 years, while all of
them are capable of enlargement.

The local problem thus raises the question
of the general problem as it awaits solution
in all communitites. Deaths increase, of
course, as population increases, but with the
increase of population, and with the extension
of town and city boundaries which it brings
in its wake, there takes place a gradual
narrowing of the rural spaces capable of
being utilized for purposes of interment. To
describe the process roughly, it may be said
that grave land decreases in amount as the
demand for it increases, while any general
resort to city land for interments of the
future is out of the question. A problem of
the near future for all growing communities
is thus the problem of how to dispose of their
dead. In various European countries, most
of them overcrowded, return has been made
to the ancient
Practice of Cremation.
In Italy, where cremation has been legal-
ized since 1877, about 1000 bodies have al-
ready been burnt within crematory furnaces
erected in such towns as Milan, Lodi, Cre-
mona, Brescia, Padua and Rome. Agitation
in Germany has led to the erection at Gotha
of a large mortuary and crematorium, where,
between 1878 and 1888, more than 550
bodies have been burnt, the ashes of the
dead being subsequently lodged in the colum-
baria of the crematory temple. In 1888 the
authorities of Pere la Chaise erected two
crematory furnaces in that cemetery, just 10
years after crematory apparatus had been
purchased for use in the English cemetery of
Woking. The governments of Belgium,
Russia and Austria have not yet legalized
cremation, but societies for the promotion of
the process exists in nearly every country of
Europe. Cremation is legal in the United
States, but it has thus far not found much
favor, though crematories are said to be in
frequent use in various states of the Union.

The opponents of cremation base their op-
position on the ground of tender feelings for
the dead, and of religious considerations con-
nected with the belief in resurrection; while
the advocates of the practice urge its adop-
tion on sanitary grounds, claiming that the
opposition is of no utility to the dead, and
against the interests of the living. There is
also a medico-juridical objection to cremation
on the ground that, if nothing were recover-
able of a body but its ashes, many murders,
especially those by poisoning, might escape
discovery; but against this danger the cre-
mationists provide by a medical examination
of the body before it is burnt.

It may be here of interest to recall the fact
that in 1886 the trustees of Mt. Auburn gave
considerable attention to the subject of cre-
mation. In compliance with instructions "to
consider the expediency of establishing a
crematorium, or of adopting any other method
of taking care of the dead, so that sanitary
law shall not be violated," a committee ap-
pointed by the trustees reported as follows:
"The usual method of disposing of the bodies
of the dead in this country is by interment.
Such has not only been the practice here for
generations, but has also been the usage of
the Christian world for centuries. It is only
within a few years that the subject of crema-
tion has been brought to public notice.
Our own corporation was formed for
the purpose of interment. It is so
stated in our acts of incorporation, and
we have no other powers. Should the
public require cremation of us, our powers
would have to be enlarged. There would
seem, however, to be necessity for this.
Since our lsat annual meeting cremation has
been legalized by the Legislature of Massa-
chusets, and provision made by general law
for the formation of corporations for that
purpose, under the supervision of the board
of health, lunacy and charity. The corpora-
tions already organized under this law are
sufficient for the present need, and were this
not the case, our friends could easily organ-
ize a corporation under the provisions of this
act, in connection with our own cemetery.