secondly, because, by the complete resolution of the body
into its elementary and inodorous gases in the cremation furnace, that
intervening chemical link between the organic and inorganic worlds,
the ammonia, is destroyed, and the economy of nature is thereby
dangerously disturbed; thirdly, because the natural tendencies of the
people lead them still to the earth, as the most fitting resting-place
into which, when lifeless, they should be drawn.

Thus the cemetery holds its place in our city, but in a form much
modified from the ordinary cemetery. The burial ground is artificially
made of a fine carboniferous earth. Vegetation of rapid growth is
cultivated over it. The dead are placed in the earth from the bier,
either in basket work or simply in the shroud; and the monumental
slab, instead of being set over or at the head or foot of a raised
grave, is placed in a spacious covered hall or temple, and records
simply the fact that the person commemorated was recommitted to earth
in those grounds. In a few months, indeed, no monument would
indicate the remains of any dead. In that rapidly-resolving soil the
transformation of dust into dust is too perfect to leave a trace of
residuum. The natural circle of transmutation is harmlessly completed,
and the economy of nature conserved.

RESULTS.

Omitting, necessarily, many minor but yet important details, I close
the description of the imaginary health city. I have yet to indicate
what are the results that might be fairly predicted in respect to the
disease and mortality presented under the conditions specified.

Two kinds of observation guide me in this essay: one derived from
statistical and sanitary work; the other from experience, extended now
over thirty years, of disease, its phenomena, its origins, its causes,
its terminations.

I infer, then, that in our model city certain forms of disease would
find no possible home, or, at the worst, a home so transient as not
to affect the mortality in any serious degree. The infantile diseases,
infantile and remittent fevers, convulsions, diarrhoea, croup,
marasmus, dysentery, would, I calculate, be almost unknown. Typhus
and typhoid fevers and cholera could not, I believe, exist in the
city except temporarily, and by pure accident; small-pox would be
kept under entire control; puerperal fever and hospital fever would,
probably, cease altogether; rheumatic fever, induced by residence
in damp houses, and the heart diseas