There need be nothing humiliating in such thoughts; the operations of Nature are always admirable.  But when the relics of humanity are deliberately appropriated to such mechanical or scientific purposes as we shall relate, before they have entirely lost their original (we should say latest) form, then most men would look upon the act as in some sort a desecration.  With what holy horror would the ancient Egyptians regard the economical uses to which their embalmed bodies were appropriated a few centuries ago!  In the words of Ambrose Pare, the great surgeon of five French kings in the sixteenth century, is a full account of the preparation and administration of “mummie,”—­that is, Egyptian mummies, powdered and made into pills and potions,—­“to such as have falne from high places or have beene otherwise bruised.”  The learned physician enters his protest against the use of it, (which he says is almost universal with the faculty,) as quite inefficacious and disgusting.  His disgust, however, arises principally from the fact that the “mummie” prepared by the apothecaries must have been derived “from the carcases of the basest people of Egypt; for the nobelmen and cheefe of the province, so religiously addicted to the monuments of their ancestors, would never suffer the bodyes of their friends and kindred to be transported hither for filthy gaine and detested use.”

If such traffic be base, what shall we say of some priests of Nicaragua, who renovate their burial-grounds by exhuming the bones of the dead, with the earth that surrounds them, and selling the mass to the manufacturers of nitre?  No sentiment of reverence for the sepulchres of their fathers incites them to resist the inroads of foreign pirates,—­for they manufacture their fathers’ bones into gunpowder.

Let us turn away from the revolting picture.  The glimpses of Nature’s revolutions which we have enjoyed are more agreeable.  We are no advocates for any attempts of preserving the human body from decomposition; that which will restore the beloved forms of friends most readily to their primitive elements, and avert the possibility of anything so dear remaining to excite our aversion or disgust, or becoming a pestilential agent, we would cordially encourage.  There can be no doubt that use would soon render cremation as little disagreeable to the feelings as consigning the precious remains to slow decay and food for worms; and few will long be pained at the thought of mingling at once with the common earth and air, and returning to usefulness in other forms, after the soul has passed to heavenly spheres to enjoy the blessings of immortal life.

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CHIP DARTMOUTH.