CEMETERY, a place appropriated for the reception of the dead.
In order to free the living of the dangerous and of fensive miasmata of dead bodies, almost all nations have done something towards their speedy removal or de struction. Some cast them into the waters, others car ry them from their dwellings to sequestered places, and some reduce them to ashes, or deposit them entire in the earth.
In a savage state, each member of a family is interred by his immediate relatives near the spot of his decease; or bodies are, in the same way, consumed by fire. Thus the untutored native of the Australasian regions, as we have seen, raised a bier for his departed wife, and, un assisted, consigned her ashes to the dust. The remote inhabitants of the north, precluded by perpetual frosts from penetrating the ground, cover their deceased with the branches of trees, to prevent them from being de voured by beasts of prey. Though the tics of consan guinity be recognised by mankind farther advanced in civilization, it does not appear that they are careful to deposit the bodies of relatives in the immediate vicinity of each other. Hence particular cemeteries, or those for common use, arc unknown.
Yet it has anxiously been desired by men in general, that their bones should rest in the soil of their nativity. When the Nomadic tribes of South America, wandering many hundred miles from their proper boundaries, lose one of their number, they make a skeleton of his bones, and carry it on his favourite horse to the cemetery of his family, however distant. Certain tribes make skeletons of all their deceased, which are placed in a sitting pos ture, clothed in robes and feathers, in the cemetery. Every year the cemetery is opened, and the skeletons are cleansed and clothed anew. In another portion of that ast continent a pious festival is celebrated, wherein each person carries the putrid and decaying carcase of his father on his shoulders in solemn procession, and again returns it to the earth.
The cemeteries of the Jews, were caves and grounds apart from their cities. Abraham, we are told, pur 1 based the field of Mackpelah, and there buried Sarah his wife in a cave, wherein he himself was afterwards deposited. The Israelites buried the bones of Joseph
which they had brought out of Egypt, " in a parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamon;" and the Jewish laws particularly ordained the interment of criminals who died by the cord.
Other ancient nations, such as the G reeks and Ro mans, though they burned their dead, had without the cities for depositing the urns containing the fragments of bones and ashes. Cremation did not inva riably prevail, and it was not unusual even to make the house or garden of tile deceased his cemetery. But among the Romans, the emperor Adrian prohibited se pulture within the city, and there was a cemetery beyond its wails appropriated for the poor ; the other cemete ries for persons of rank or fortune were generally near a highway. The Campus Martins was the cemetery of distinguished characters.
The modern Turks and Chinese imitate the Greeks and Romans, in placing their cemeteries without their cities. They are generally situated on eminences, and abound with cypress trees. The Chinese never inter in a grave previously occupied, at least before all the rem nants of the former body have disappeared, and there fore their cemeteries occupy a large surface of ground. If unfortunate in life, the son sometimes digs up his fa ther from the grave, to propitiate his destiny.
The ancient cemeteries in Great Britain were of va rious descriptions. Barrows or cairns denote the sepul ture of celebrated persons, commonly, it is conjectured, those who fell in battle. The author of this article some years ago opened a cemetery in Scotland, which proba bly ascends to a period of remote antiquity. Numerous coffins, for the most part of small size, were formed of rude slates, built round for sides : they were almost le vel with the surface of the earth, and the edges of some of the slates were visible above it. Their site was on a thin soil, covering rock, though deep earth was in the immediate vicinity. These coffins did not lie east and west, but some almost due north and south, from which it may be inferred they had been used anterior to the in troduction of Christianity. Many contained fragments of bones, and some teeth very entire.