Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 September 1893 — BONES. [ARTICLE]

BONES.

The Ultimate Destination of the Most Durable Parts of the Body. The bones are a composition of lime and phosphorus, and are the most durable part of the human system. Leave the body of a man or animal exposed to the air, in a few weeks it passes into the earth and atmosphere, leaving only the skeleton, which, after a considerable lapse of time, disappears also. This reabsorption of the body by the elements is comparatively rapid in the towers of the Parsees and in the case of those who perish in traversing the desert. The body of man cannot properly lie said toreturn to dust. Tlmt is an ancient prejudice. Even in the case of the bones the phosphate passes parti, into the earth or air in the form of oxygen or phosphorus, and the lime is mixed with the soil, embodied in rocks, or dissolved in water. In the process of cremation the tissues disappear in the form of vapor, and there remains a residue composed of pieces of bone of various sizes, which, if water is added and they are dried, become a coarse dust that can he hermetically sealed in an urn and preserved for au indefinite period. Even the process of embalming practised by the ancient Egyptians could not prevent the resolving of the body into its original elements. If fragments of tho tissues or if the bones remain it is because their character is entirely changed * by tho guins and other substances employed by the embalmors. As to em balmiug as practised in these days it. is of too recent origin to furnish any reliable data as to its efficacy as a preservative method. The Egyptians endeavored to preserve the entire body by smothering it in antiseptic substances, the Greeks, Romans, and other nations, ancient and modern, by enclosing it in solid coffins and monumental tombs. The success has never been commensurate with the effort. Isolated efforts have been made to preserve the whole or a part of the osseous structure as a decent tribute to humanity, as relics, or as a lugubrious reminder of man’s mortality. Great conquerors, like Tamerlane, did not take the trouble to bury those slaughtered in their battles, or in the populous cities they ravaged, but left along their line of march hundreds of thousands of blenohing skeletons collected years afterwards and piled in pyramids that were soon wasted away by the winds and storms. After the battle of Morgarten the Swiss made a aimilar pyramid of the bonos of the soldiers the Austrians left on tho battlefield. Considering tho millions that havo perished on fields of battle, especially in Europe, during tho last thousand years, it is nstonisldng that so few bones are turned iip by the plough or found in excavating tho soil. In those days human bonos found by chance are decently buried, ov if it is necessary to condemn an old cemetery the remains found in it are interred elsewhere. In Paris this process has been going on for a hundred yearn, that in, since the epoch of tho French revolution. The hones of those buried hastily after street riots, and those of the dead of tho disused cenieterles, havo been removed from time to time to the catacombs, until the number of skeletons more or less complete hero assembled amounts at present to six millions. In the cemetery of the Capueines at Rome human bones are arranged in fanciful designs whose artistic ingenuity relieve* considerably tho painful suggestions of mortality, tt is a theory of certain religious orders that, death should be kept continually in mind by actions or objects of a sepulchral nature. The comparative durability of tho bones ha* caused their extensive preservation os sacred relics. Tho list of these is too long to be given with any sort of completeness. Of all the anoient nations only the Egyptians have succeeded in preserving the remains of their sovereigns for a respectable length of time. Not a bone remains of the rulers of ancient Greece or Rome. Some hones of Charlemagne are preserved in the cathedral of Aix Itr Chapelle. Not one of any of his contemporaries i* known to bo in existence. The remains of the Plantagenet kings aud queens buried at Fontevrault Abbey were torn from their caskets and scattered to the four winds by the populace at the time of tho French revolution. Those of the French sovereigns shared the same fate; but of the latter, If their labels may lie believed, there are at the Louvre Museum, though not on oxhibition, a shoulder blade of Hugh Capet, a thigh bone of Charles V., a tibia each 'of Charles VI. and Francis 1., vertebra- of Charles VII., the ribs of Louis the Handsome and Louis XII., and tho lower jaw of Catherine de Medicis. There is at Westminster Abbey a very considerable collection of royal coffins containing what is left of tha English kings for some hundreds of years back, but the precise condition of the contents is unknown. In othercountries the remains of sovereigns that date back over 500 years is limited. The royal relics of this kind which can cluim an antiquity of BQO years would not. by the most liberal calculation, exceed a few score, the Egyptian mummies being excepted. Of the mortal parts of the forty thousand millions of the race born and passed away in the last thousand years there still exist perhaps the fragments of the skeletons of a thousand born before the year 1000,—[New York Sun.