preceded by amendment, and that errors which were demonstrated to be such, and matter which had become obsolete, ought not to be continually reproduced and re-enacted, as though they were an essential and a vital part of the law of the land. In this opinion we think that most persons will concur who have analysed this question through the unobstructed medium of their common sense. No Government which is anxious to promote the welfare of the people can long remain indifferent to the importance of this subject; and no Government which desires to see the laws of the country respected should relax in its endeavours to make them just and equitable by the earnest prosecution of a work which will serve to render them at once more easy of access and more intelligible. To tell the people that they must obey the laws, and that their violation will subject them to punishment, and then further to tell them that they will find the articles of those laws dispersed through forty volumes of Statutes, and through a thousand volumes of Reports, is practically to violate the provisions of the Great Charter, and to repudiate the theory of our constitution, which proclaims that justice shall not be withheld from, or sold to any man. The establishment of rights and the redress of wrongs can only be effected through the recognised channels of legal action; and these are made available to none who cannot afford to purchase the requisite knowledge from those who, having devoted a life to its acquisition, are alone competent to afford it. Under the most auspicious circumstances, with laws condensed and codified, it will never be possible to place all men upon an equality in this respect; for the complicated wants of a civilised community forbid the indulgence of the hope that its laws can ever be made so simple as to become popularised in encyclopaedias and in handbooks. Still a great stride may be made in this direction; and there seems, at all events, no reason why we should stand still and refrain from making any effort to familiarise the people with our laws, simply because to do so must be a work of considerable time and labour, and be attended with more than ordinary difficulty. Difficulties would speedily vanish if the work of codification were resolutely undertaken; and though it might not be practicable to engage in the task of codifying the Statute and the Common Law contemporaneously, we have little doubt that the codification of the Statute would greatly facilitate the codification of the Common Law. The one would naturally follow upon the accomplishment of the other; and a lucid enunciation of their principles perspicuously arranged would prove so valuable an acquisition that all would be amazed that our law should have been so long maintained in its existing state of intricacy and confusion. To make sure, however, of what has been gained, and to prevent the necessity of future commissions, it will be necessary to delegate delegate to some responsible authority the superintendence of our future legislation. All the parts of our legal system must henceforth be made subordinate to the preservation of the harmony of the whole, and the enactment of legislative measures must be so controlled as to render the introduction of inconsistencies and positive errors into our Statute Law a matter of impossibility. Every proposed measure must be subjected to a careful examination and comparison with previous legislation upon the same subject, and then we may hope to arrest the future accumulation of statutes, excepting in those cases where new legislation is from time to time required to meet new wants and the altered circumstances of society. We forbear from inquiring by what machinery this important end may be best attained, but we commend it to the serious consideration of all who are studious of their country's good, as a fitting corollary to the Consolidation and Amendment of the Statute Law. ART. III.-1. Burning of the Dead, or Urn Sepulture. By a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons. 1857. 2. Report on General Scheme for Extra-mural Sepulture presented to the two Houses of Parliament. 1850. 6 EAT, or be eaten,' is said to be the great law of nature. We swallow animalcula while we live-when we die, they devour us in their turn. But a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons has come forward, who prefers that the maw-worms of the grave should not ultimately pasture themselves on his body. He has conceived the idea of reviving the ancient mode of urn sepulture, and the transmutation of our remains into the elements by means of fire. Moreover, he supports his theory by reasons which may not be without their weight with advocates of sanitary reform, and even with admirers of art generally. What is to be said on the subject we will presently lay before our readers, premising, however, that we do not commit ourselves to the advocacy either of the views or the theology set forth in this little brochure. According to Kant, death is the only dreamless sleep. Perhaps without the wearying but salutary pain of dreams, sleep would be death.' It is variously regarded by mortals according to temperament, creed, disposition, and state of health. It may be what the sect of Moravians so beautifully term their sleep,' or it may be the life change of the Pantheist, where death itself is not but what we call death is only the beginning of a new form of life. 'Nothing but doth suffer an earth change, Chateaubriand Chateaubriand has finely described the strict analogy between our gradual decay and that of all other forms of nature. The leaves falling like our years; the flowers fading like our hours; the clouds fleeting like our illusions; the light diminishing like our intelligence; the sun growing cold like our affections; the river becoming frozen like our lives-all bear secret relation to our destinies.' So is death the order of nature. Still deathalways death-whatever idea we may choose to attach to it is known to ancient and modern, Pagan and Christian, savage or civilised, Mystic or Atheist, as the one thing inevitable, which may be scoffed at, but cannot be cheated-whom we may not desire to invite, but whose invitation may not be refused. Now, perhaps, in comparison with what awaits us after death, we ought to care little for that which may befal our untenanted bodies. Standing on the eve of departure from this earth-rinded, as it is, with the ashes of many thousand years-these considerations should appear infinitely contemptible, invisibly small; but in actual experience it is otherwise. That our bodies should be decently buried, and the expenses thereof discharged in preference to all other claims, forms, as we know, the foremost article in every respectable Englishman's last will and testament ;that a man should direct his body to be disposed of in any eccentric fashion, or uncared for in the ordinary mode, is almost considered evidence of mental derangement;-that his body should be given for dissection is the crowning disgrace to the malefactor;-that it should be interred without the usual rites is the thought that has been proposed to deter the suicide;-that a corpse should be left neglected and unburied has from all times been the most cruel insult which the living can offer to the dead. Wherefore all nations have had their funeral rites more or less mysterious, imposing, and costly, according to their degree of civilisation or their progress in religion and poetic feeling. Let the author speak :— 'As we cast aside a garment that is worn out, or is so torn and tattered that it will no longer cover us; as we leave a house that is falling into ruin and is no longer fit to shelter us, so do we depart from our mortal bodies, and we regard them with the same kind of interest and affection. A cloak or coat that we have worn during a long voyage or journey, although it may be but "a thing of shreds and patches," is seldom thrown away without a sigh, and the house in which we have dwelt for many years becomes strangely endeared to us. So, too, when those that are beloved have left us either for a distant part of this world or for another, do we not cherish and mourn over the inanimate things that were most intimately connected with their presence among us, as the room, the bed, the chair that is still called his or hers? And yet we never speak to them as if the missing one were in his once accustomed place.' It must be admitted that, so soon as that mysterious principle which holds our dust together has fled, it is the signal for a putrefying decay and a rapid decomposition into other elements; and Lord Stowell's opinion on Iron Coffins. 127 and that, in the progress of that decomposition, certain gases are evolved, which, holding in their combination a large amount of putrescent animal matter, are not only of a disgusting effluvium, but also of a most poisonous and destructive nature. Grant that this is but a transmutation to new forms of life, it may well be a consideration to philanthropists how this necessary process may be begun and carried on so as least to imperil the health and happiness of humanity-in a word, how we may dispose of our dead with the smallest amount of injury to the living. Among some nations water is selected as the hiding-place of the dead. By our mariners it has been a matter of necessity; and the deep salt sea has received into its insatiable depths more brave men and fair women, more loving hearts and hoarded treasure, than can well be summed up in history or told of in poetry. Down the waters of the sacred Ganges or Hooghley float innumerable corpses, which may be seen continuing their dismal voyage covered by birds of prey already commencing their disgusting meal. There are lands where bodies are left to decompose in the air-where wild dogs, jackals, and vultures perform the last offices, leaving the well-picked skeleton to whiten in the sun. In one island in Polynesia the corpse of a man is suspended about two feet from the ground, until a watcher, appointed for the purpose, sees the skull drop off, which is then carried to the widow, who henceforth wears it hung about her person as a memento or charm. The custom of embalming, as performed by the Egyptians and other nations of antiquity, is at best an unnatural and imperfect effort to interfere with the laws of nature. 'In the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London may be seen the first wife of one Martin Van Butchell, who, at her husband's request, was embalmed by Dr. William Hunter and Mr. Carpenter, in the year 1775. No doubt extraordinary pains were taken to preserve both form and feature, and yet what a wretched mockery of a once lovely woman now appears, with its shrunken and rotten-looking bust, its hideous mahogany-coloured face, and its remarkably fine set of teeth. Between the feet are the remains of a green parrot, whether immolated or not at the death of its mistress is uncertain, but, as it still retains its plumage, it is a far less repulsive-looking object than the larger biped. By the side of Mrs. Van Butchell is the body of another woman embalmed by a different process, about the same period. She is even more ugly than her neighbour. Then there are Egyptian mummies rolled and unrolled, and almost tumbling to pieces. Mummies from Peru and Teneriffe, and one poor fellow from our antipodes, who has been sun-baked by his friends, it being the custom of some Australian tribes to let their dead dry and wither in the open air. He is tied up in a bundle, and looks about the most horribly grotesque mummy of them all.' It was once, indeed, a question in one of our English courts of law whether iron coffins were legally used, and Lord Stowell pronounced the following opinion:-All contrivances that, whether intentionally or not, prolong the time of dissolution beyond the period at which the common local understanding and usage have fixed, are an act of injustice unless compensated in some way or other." other.' This would seem to point the finger of reprehension to that grievous corruption which exists in most of our older churches, the family vaults, which are at once the sepulchre of the dead and the pest-houses of the living. The sense of smell, like our other senses, was given us not only to guide us to pleasure but to warn us of danger. Every disagreeable smell is not, therefore, necessarily noxious; but few can have failed to experience a certain sensation of nausea, and difficulty of respiration, when they inhale for any length of time that faint earthy scent of death which lingers about some of our most beautiful and ancient churches and cathedrals. But of this more anon. There is another mode of disposing of dead bodies among certain nations which prevails among the loyal subjects of the kings of the cannibal islands— namely, to eat them. Whole crews of sailors have been transmuted in this inglorious manner. The following fact was communicated to Commodore Wilkes, of the exploring expedition, by a savage of the Feejee Islands. He stated that a vessel, the hull of which was still lying on the beach, had come ashore in a storm, and that all the crew had fallen into the hands of the savages. What did you do with them? inquired Wilkes.'Killed them,' answered the savage. What did you do with them after you had killed them?' demanded the commodore.- Eat them -good,' returned the cannibal. Did you eat them all?' inquired the half-sick commodore.- Yes; all but one.' And why did you spare that one?' asked Wilkes. Because he taste too much like tobacco-couldn't eat him nohow,' was the curious response. Cremation, or the destruction of human remains through the action of fire, was the most extensively used, and was considered the most honourable mode by most of the nations of antiquity. And thence the idea of the funeral pyre and urn sepulture is as much associated with heathenism as burial in the earth is with Christianity, though there is, in truth, no necessary connection between the two. Though it is now well ascertained that the body of the poet Shelley was burnt, from reasons pertaining to the quarantine regulations, it was at the time considered an additional proof-had any been required—of his determined hostility to Christian observances; and it was with some little difficulty that a clergyman could be persuaded to read the burialservice over his remains. The Greeks commonly burned their dead on the sixth or seventh day after death; but up to that time myrrh, gum of cedar-tree, salt, wax, and many costly and sweet-scented drugs, honey, balm, and bitumen were used to prevent any disagreeable odour. The funeral pile itself was composed of fir or pine wood, generally in the form of an altar. Pitch, turpentine, and other inflammable substances were spread over the pile, and cypress trees were set round at a certain dis tance. |