Gen. M. C. Meigs, U.S.A., discusses the burial of the dead as follows
in _Building_:
I see that the question of disposing of the dead in towers of
masonry, or by cementation, is being discust. It is not new.
Asiatic conquerors have built the living, after capture of
their cities, into towers of masonry, using their bodies as
blocks, and generally the adobe mortars of the desert plains for
cementing them together. One of them built a pyramid or tower
containing thousands of heads.
The city of New York inters in its Potter’s Field about four
thousand bodies annually. Europe rents a grave site for a term
of years--a short term--and then disinters the bones and packs
them in a catacomb or a vault. Would not New York save money and
treat its dead with greater respect if it embedded each body in
a mass of Hudson River cement and sand (Beton Coignet)? I find
that one-half a cubic yard of Beton Coignet will completely
enclose the body of a man of six feet stature, weighing two
hundred pounds. The average human being would require even less
than thirteen cubic feet. At ruling prices such a sarcophagus
would cost only two or three dollars. The name and date, a
perpetual record and memorial of the dead, could be inscribed
with letter-punches or stamps on the head or foot of the block
or sarcophagus. Ranged alongside each other in contact, and in
two rows, _i.e._, two blocks deep, these would build on any
suitable plan a fourteen-foot wall, massive enough and strong
enough to be carried to the height of one hundred and fifty feet.
Thus would be erected, at the rate of nearly two thousand
cubic yards per year, a great temple of silence, a grand and
everlasting monument to those who pass away. The designs for
such a monument seem worthy of the study of our best architects.
It might be a pyramid, a cone, a tower, or a temple, or a long
gallery like those of the Italian city of Bologna, the most
beautiful cemetery in the world.
Many years ago the London _Architect_ published the
proposal of an architect to erect by slow degrees and in
successive courses a solid pyramid in which, in cells, the dead
of London would be enclosed. But this made no provision for
memorial inscriptions or visible records. The fourteen-foot wall
does this.--_Building._
(296)
=Burial too Expensive=--See POVERTY.
=Buried Cities=--See EARTH INCREASING.