Cremation, ancient and modern : the history of fire-funeral a lecture delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society, St. George's Hall, Langham Place, on Sunday afternoon, 14th March, 1886 / by George Wotherspoon.

  • Wotherspoon, G. (George)
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Cremation, ancient and modern : the history of fire-funeral a lecture delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society, St. George's Hall, Langham Place, on Sunday afternoon, 14th March, 1886 / by George Wotherspoon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/28 (page 15)
    and vegetable forms: from the animal that yields carbonic acid to the flower of the field which lives on it, from the vegetable formed of carbon to the man who eats the vegetable ; and thus the balance of Nature is kept up. But we in our little way do our best to upset that balance, and are punished accordingly. There is, as you know, only a limited quantity of material in the world, and though none of this can ever be lost, much may be rendered temporarily useless. This is what we render the dead bodies we bury in the earth, and in this manner we interfere with Nature’s designs. To eternal Nature this may not matter much ; but to her ephemeral children it matters a great deal. If we stow away an annually increasing amount of material which, for our own sakes, is required to enter the vegetable world, we ultimately straiten our own resources, and this not inappreciably. For in order to replace the material which we thus wantonly waste, we are obliged to purchase at a considerable cost essentially similar material from other countries that may be able to spare it. Let me make this clearer by an illustration. In 1883, according to the Board of Trade returns, there was imported into the United Kingdom, chiefly for agricultural purposes, 86,346 tons’ weight of bones, representing a value of <£617,748. A large sum of money, in these hard times, to be spent unprofitably. And why unprofitably ? Because needlessly. From an annual mortality of 80,000 in London alone, there might be derived by means of Cremation more than 1,000 tons of ashes and bone earth, to say nothing of other solid matters which would be resolved into gaseous food for plants, and so indirectly become serviceable to man. All this material we do our best to render for an indefinite period un¬ available. Nor is it any excuse that we are employing in its stead material that was similarly made useless in the past. What would we think of a man who with a view to becoming rich kept burying in the earth greater and greater sums of money, and taking out in place of them proportionately smaller sums which his father and grandfather had buried there before him ? We should laugh at such a person, I suppose, and suggest to him to lay out his surplus income to interest. But the conduct we ridicule is our own. We forget that nature allows not only interest but compound interest for invested capital. We reject her proffered usury, and deliberately hide a precious talent in the earth. Nor is this the whole of the matter. Not content with hiding our treasure we must needs have a costly napkin to hide it in, and so pay doubly for our folly. Before this wasteful process of burial can be effected a heavy initial expense has to be incurred. Think