Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 May 1895 — GERMANY AND CREMATION. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

GERMANY AND CREMATION.

The Crematory in Gotha the Only One in the Empire. In Germany the authorities and the church both refuse to countenance the establishment of a crematory or to allow the friends of cremation to place urns with the ashes of their dead in any part of the cemeteries. Hence the fact that the crematory in Gotha has remained the only one in Germany to this day. It is but a few weeks ago that a Mecklenburg pastor, having delivered a funeral oration over the body of a Mecklenburg leader in liberal thought, the delegate to the Reichstag, Witte, preparatory to the incineration of the remains, was tried by the Lutheran consistory of that grand duchy and deprived of his clerical honors and functions.

The furnace at Gotha was ready in 1876, and in the spring of 1878 building operations began, after plans furnished by Dr. Reclam, on a new cemetery in Ostfelde, a suburb of Gotha. Meanwhile one of the members of the cremation society died, a civil engineer named Stier, and as he had remained a firm believer in cremation until the last, his body was the first consigned to the flames in the crematory just finished. This was on Nov. 10,1878. Since then, until Jan. 15, this year, 1,278 bodies have been cremated in Gotha. This is by far the largest number of any crematory in the world, the one in Long Island showing a list of less than 100, and the one in Western Penn-

sylvania but about 250, when last.heard from. Next to Gotha it is Milan whose crematory is put most largely to use. Women there were but 117 out of the total 1,278—a proof that woman, even in death, keeps her dread of fire. The crematory proper lies below the ground and thirty steps lead to it. There is a furnace in which the gas necessary for incinerating is generated. Adjoining is the small chamber, built of brick, in which the coffin, with the body, rests on a grate. There is a pipe conducting the gas into the crematory and a regulating apparatus permits the increasing or the decreasing of the rate at whicli the corpse is reduced to ashes. The usual time required for the purpose is hours.

TRANSFERRING COFFIN INTO ORATE.