of promoting, or ceasing to be prejudicial to, the public health
entombment will be the choice of all whom cost or caprice does not
deter.

That entombment can be made sanitary is evident from the fact that in
countless instances, in many lands and through long periods of time, it
has been made sanitary by the ingenuity of man or by unassisted nature;
and it is also evident from the fact that decomposition and disease
germs are the dangers to be guarded against, and that against these both
ancient and modern science have been able to guard. Not to enumerate all
the modes that have been chanced upon or that have been devised by men,
there are two that have been notable and are available for modern
use--embalming and desiccation.

It is a delusion to imagine that embalming is a lost art; that, like
some other marvels of the ancient time, this is a secret process that
perished with the people who employed it. Did we desire it, we could
embalm our princes and our priests, and retain their shrunken
similitudes for distant coming times to gaze and gape upon, as skilfully
as they who practised this art in Egypt's palmiest days. Nay, it is
doubtless far within the truth to claim that better than they did we
could do; and we are actually apprised of better methods and results
than they employed or could attain, and it is not unlikely that we
shall hear of better methods still. But Egypt's method, or its modern
counterpart, will hardly now be popular. It involves too much mutilation
and too much transformation. When it has done its work little is left
but bone and muscular tissue, and these are so transfused with foreign
substances that a form moulded from plastic matter or sculptured from
stone could almost as truly be considered that of the lamented dead as
this. Moreover, indefinite preservation of the dead is not desirable,