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It has even been suggested that no interval of time of any great extent is needed, as the practice of cremation may quickly develop among any race, being prompted by the comfortable idea that when the flesh is disposed of, the possibly inconvenient, possibly even vampire, ghost of a disagreeable ancestor goes along with it.
Unless he performs the cremation ceremony, he is not considered to be Siem according to the Khasi religion. U Hajon Manik Siem failed to cremate the body of his predecessor, U Ram Singh whose remains still repose in a wooden coffin which is kept in the house of the Siem family.
Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics, remarks that the opening of the plague burial-grounds at Eyam resulted in an immediate outbreak of disease. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, NO. 3, VOL. 135. In an address before the Chicago Medical Society, in advocacy of cremation, Dr. Charles W. Purdy made some striking comparisons to show what a burden is laid upon society by the burial of the dead:
Beddoe pronounced the remains to be neolithic, and the persons here interred were of a dolichocephalic or long-skulled race sometimes known as the long barrow-builders, who generally buried their dead without cremation. There were some tiny kists for children, but a great number of the bodies had been buried uncoffined.
Helmsley was quite taken aback by this sudden proposition, which presented cremation in an entirely new light. But a moment's thought restored to him his old love of argument, and he at once replied: "Why, it would have been just the same as it is now, surely! If Christ was divine, he could have risen from burnt ashes as well as from a tomb."
The Penal Code forbids water burial, and also cremation; but it is permitted to the children of a man dying at a great distance to consume their father's corpse with fire if positively unable to bring it back for ordinary burial in his native district.
In the tombs in which burial was practised, the bodies were laid in the trench without covering, and the remains of anything in the way of slabs or coffins or protecting planks are very rare; in those tombs in which cremation had been the rule, ustion had often been very incomplete, sometimes the head and. sometimes the feet having escaped the flames.
The first evidence which points to an intent to murder is the famous "cremation letter," dated August 3d. The cremation letter from Mr. Rice, authorizing Patrick to cremate his body, shows that Patrick intended to do away with Rice in such a way that an autopsy must, if possible, be prevented and the evidence of murder destroyed.
In no other way can we explain the confusion in which the human remains lay when they were discovered. Pigorini thinks this is a proof that primitive races worshipped their dead, and held their bodies in veneration. Perhaps they even carried them about in their migrations. However that may be, the custom of separating the flesh from the bones was continued until cremation became general.
Stone, bronze, and iron were found together in the Nignol tomb at Carnac, which dates from the time when cremation was already practised. We find the same association of different materials in the Rocher dolmen. In the British Isles, especially in Scotland and in Ireland, bronze and iron objects are more numerous than in France. At Aspatria, near St.
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