Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/342

330 C E M E T E It Y fear of infection from a dead body. Undertakers and their assistants who are continually at work among the dead are notoriously free from contagious disease, and, a fortiori, there can be no danger once the body is laid in the earth. It is only in very exceptional cases that it can be disturbed until many years have elapsed, and then all cause for apprehension is gone. Many of the plague-pits in the London churchyards have been reopened in places where the plague-stricken dead once lay piled in layers, and scarcely any human remains have been fouud, and these in such a condition that it would be impossible to imagine any infection or contagion from them. The changes in our cemetery system which have been suggested by Mr Seymour Haden and others have all the one common object of increasing the security of safety to the public health, by facilitating and rendering perfect the decay of the buried dead, and it is proposer! to accomplish this less by the use of any direct agency for accelerating the natural process, than by removing the obstacles that are at present placed in its way. Mr Seymour Haden tells us that a well-made wooden coffin is practically indestructible, and though it cannot prevent decomposition, yet it arrests it, and keeps the process Jong incomplete, thus considerably increasing the aggregate of decaying matter at any one time present in a cemetery, and prevent ing the return of " earth to earth." As a remedy he pro poses that we should use wicker coffins, of the present shape, made of white or stained (but unvarnished) osiers, with large open rneshes. The contents of such a receptacle could be concealed during the funeral by a graceful covering of ferns and flowers, and in cases of infectious disease, or where decomposition might commence immediately after death, the coffin could be made double with a space of two or three inches beween the inner and outer basket to ba filled with charcoal or some other disinfectant. Models of such coffins were exhibited by Mr Seymour Haden at Stafford House, London, the town residence of the duke of Sutherland in June 1875, and there is no doubt that if they were generally employed, the natural process of decay in our cemeteries would take place in a way that would leave even less room than at present for any evil resulting from carelessness or mismanagement on the part of the authorities charged with their superintendence, and the number of bodies actually decaying in any given cemetery would be comparatively few, so surely and effectually would the process be completed in a great majority of cases. The abandonment of the practice of burial in vaults, brick graves, and catacombs, such as those which are to be seen in many of the London cemeteries, is of course a corollary of this proposal ; and whether Mr Seymour Haden s plan is adopted or not, it is quite certain that our cemeteries would be greatly improved by no more brick graves being made in them, and by the open catacombs being closed wherever they exist. Such places are very difficult to ventilate, and must frequently be the source of malarious exhalations. Amongst other proposals which have been made it has been suggested, that when a good natural soil containing carbon does not exist the site of the proposed cemetery should be excavated to the depth of about 12 feet, and then filled up with an artificial soil composed of carbon, lime, and sand. The existence of carbon in the soil would remove any danger of water pollution through nitration from the cemetery, while the lime would tend to accelerate the resolution of the decaying matter into its original elements. This is Dr Richardson s proposal, and he further adds that the cemetery should be planted with quick-grow ing shrubs and ornamental grasses, the trees being confined to an encircling belt of wood, and a series of memorial tablets in an adjacent edifice being substituted for tomb stones and monuments. He further points out thatwith such a method the cemetery might be renovated after a certain number of years by substituting freshly-prepared soil for the old. But there does not seem to be any advantage in this. There must always be open spaces in and around our cities for the sake of fresh air, and a cemetery in which interments have ceased for some years, and in which the ornamental plantations were kept in good order, would form a useful park or garden. In the disposal of our dead feeling must always be allowed to be a considerable factor in the arguments for the adoption of any given plan, and it appears that in Great Britain and Ireland there would be an amount of dislike to any method which did not assign to our dead something like a lasting place of interment. This feeling does not by any means exist in some of the countries of the Continent. In one of the cemeteries of Naples numerous burials take place in a series of 365 pits. One pit is opened each day, the dead are laid in it, and it is filled with an earth containing a large quantity of lime. A year after the pit is reopened, the earth with its contents, now almost entirely decayed, is removed, fresh earth is placed in its stead, and the pit is again ready for new interments. The chief cemeteries of London are Kensal Green Cemetery on the Harrow Road, about 2| miles from Paddington, which has an area of 18 acres and already contains the remains of 70,000 dead ; Highgate Cemetery, which occupies a considerable portion of the slope of High- gate Hill, and commands one of the best views of London ; the cemetery at Abney Park (once the residence of Dr Watts), which is adorned with very fine plantations of old growth ; the Norwood and Nunhead cemeteries to the south of London ; the West London Cemetery at Brompton ; the cemeteries at Ilford and Leytonstone in Essex ; the Victoria Cemetery and the Tower Hamlets Cemetery in East London ; and at a still greater distance, and generally accessible only by railway, the great cemetery at Woking near Guild- ford in Surrey, and the cemetery at Colney Hatch. The general plan of all these cemeteries is the same, a park with broad paths either laid out in curved lines as at Kensal Green and Highgate, or crossing each at right angles as in the case of the West London Cemetery. The ground on each side of these paths is marked off into grave feet Fro. 1. West London Cemetery, Brompton. spaces, and trees and shrubs are planted in the intervals between them. The buildings consist of a curator s residence and one or more chapels, and usually there is also a range of catacombs, massive structures containing in their corridors recesses for the reception of coffins, generally closed only by an iron grating. The provincial cemeteries in the main features of their arrangements resemble those of the metropolis. One of the most remarkable is St James s Cemetery at Liverpool, which occupies a deserted quarry. The face of the eastern side of the quarry is

traversed by ascending gradients off which open catacombs