isms of various species, each giving rise to phenomena of constitutional disturbance which compose the symptoms of the particular disease. It has been proved in many cases that these organisms are capable of living and multiplying outside the human body, and that their germs or spores are extraordinarily tenacious of life, that they survive for long periods burial in earth and exposure to moisture, until at last finding their way into a suitable habitat, they spring into active life and multiply themselves with almost incredible rapidity and with a virulence unabated by the vicissitudes to which they may have been subjected. Now long before these facts in the life-history of disease-producing organisms and the class of living entities to which they belong, had been worked out through the labours of such men as Pasteur in France, Koch in Germany, and Tyndall in Great Britain-and though our knowledge on the subject has made enormous strides, this branch of science is barely fifteen years old-long before there was the slightest suspicion of many of the facts now known to us, numbers of instances had been collected of outbursts of diseases apparently due to exposure to infection from the longburied dead.

The malady in which the connection between the disease and one of those micro-organisms of which I have just spoken was earliest demonstrated was cattle-anthrax, or splenic fever, a disease which in France had for years worked great havoc among flocks and herds, and the relatively large size of the micro-organism connected with which has rendered its lifehistory a matter of comparatively easy study. Among the earliest to undertake the investigation of the Bacillus Anthracis, as this organism is called, was M. Pasteur, and having discovered that it could be cultivated outside the body he proceeded to study its mode of propagation and growth. He found that like many similar organisms it multiplies itself in two distinct manners, by the subdivision of its cells into other cells which rapidly acquire the standard size-a method which under favourable circumstances goes on with marvellous rapidity; and secondly, by a process analogous to flowering in the higher classes of plants, resulting

in the formation of spores or seeds. M. Pasteur found that under conditions of temperature and nutrition which he could command at will, the bacillus of cattle-anthrax produced these spores, and that in them a latent life could survive the roughest treatment and remain unimpaired for considerable periods, ready to burst into activity whenever an opportunity presented itself. Now, in 1865 Baron Seebach had been Saxon Minister at Paris. Having suffered severely on his estates from outbreaks of splenic fever he had taken much interest in the disease, and had come to the conclusion that it was in some way connected with the poisoning of the pasture through the burial of the carcases of infected animals. On one occasion a sheep that had died of it was buried in the corner of a field on his estate on which the next year a crop of corn was grown, and on the following one a crop of clover. One day, happening to pass the field, the Baron's attention was attracted to the extraordinary luxuriance of the patch of clover that had grown over the spot, and a few days later he observed that some one had cut down and stolen the clover which grew at that particular corner of the field. A couple of days afterwards a peasant woman on his estate came to him in great distress to implore assistance, as her goat had died and her cow was very ill. On investigation the disease which had attacked them was found to be splenic fever, and on cross-examination the woman confessed that she had stolen the clover from the spot where the carcase of the dead sheep had been buried, and that she had given it to the goat and cow. Baron Seebach had at the request of the French Minister of Agriculture embodied this and other circumstances which had led him to adopt his theory as to the mode of propagation of splenic fever in a memorandum which years afterwards, when M. Pasteur's investigations regarding the disease became the theme of universal interest in scientific and agricultural circles, was placed by the department in his hands. Acting on this clue M. Pasteur set to work to make experiments. He found the spores of the Anthrax Bacillus in full vitality in pits in which oxen and sheep that had died of the disease had been buried ten years before. Not only so, but he proved that thus buried,

earthworms, swallowing them in the earth out of which their nourishment is extracted, brought them to the surface, whence they found their way to the surrounding herbage mixed up with mud or dust, thus infecting sheep or cattle which pastured on it. It was not even necessary that the animals should eat the poisoned herbage; it was found by experiment to be sufficient for the purposes of infection if, placed upon the ground, they were allowed to inhale the dust which rose from it. M. Pasteur conclusively demonstrated this method of infection in an instance where a bullock had been buried in a pit over six feet deep. He placed sheep upon the ground, and they took the disease. He separated the spores of the organism of the disease from the earth by washing it, and multiplying them by cultivation in suitable media, he found that on inoculation into healthy animals they gave rise to splenic fever. He found these spores especially in the casts brought to the surface by earthworms, and in the contents of their digestive organs, and he showed further that when the nature of the soil was such that earthworms were rare, the disease when accidentally imported had no tendency to spread. In 1883 Dr. Domingos Friere, a physician commissioned by the Brazilian Government to enquire into the mode of propagation of yellow fever, made some discoveries which shew a remarkable analogy to those of M. Pasteur in the case of cattleanthrax and illustrate the direct bearing of the latter on the subject with which we are dealing. The researches of Dr. Friere shewed that yellow fever in man was due to the invasion of a micro-organism which he termed the Cryptococcus Zanthogenicus, which like the Bacillus Anthracis could be cultivated outside the human body. He shewed in the same way as had been shewn in connection with other disease organisms, that this organism was present in immense numbers in the secretions and excretions of patients suffering from yellow fever, and that it was capable of producing that disease in animals. susceptible to it, such as rabbits and guinea pigs. Having visited the Jurajuba Cemetery, where patients dying in the Maritime Hospital of Santa Anna are buried, he gathered from a foot below the surface some of the earth from the grave of

a person who had died about a year before of yellow fever. In it Dr. Friere found myriads of specimens of the Cryptococcus Zanthogenicus in all stages of its development. Cultivated in gelatine the Cryptoccus so obtained, when inoculated into the circulation of guinea pigs produced yellow fever, and other guinea pigs shut up in a confined space with the infected earth obtained from the grave, caught the disease in a few days and perished. Dr. Friere's observations, verified in all their details by his assistants, 'shewed that the germs of yellow fever perpetuate themselves into the cemeteries which are like so many nurseries for the preparation of new generations destined to devastate our city. Through the pores of the earth these germs spread into the atmosphere; others are carried by the torrential rains so frequent among us to the street and squares, and finding there means adequate for their evolution, give rise to the eruption of epidemics in the summer, which is the most proper season for their sporulation.' As a temporary provision Dr. Friere recommends that the cemeteries should be removed to a distance from populous places.

'As a definite and radical measure,' he continues, 'the practice of cremating the bodies would suit completely, and it would be the surest means of extinguishing the epidemics which every year ravage with greater or less intensity, our most flourishing centres of population. If each corpse,' he adds, 'is the bearer of millions of millions of organisms that are specifics of ill, imagine what a cemetery must be in which new foci are forming around each body. Imagination is incapable of conceiving the literally infinite number of microbes that multiply in these nests. In the silence of death these worlds of organisms invisible to the unassisted eye are labouring incessantly and unperceived to fill more graves with more bodies destined for their food and for the fatal perpetuation of their species.'

Other investigators have made more or less similar discoveries regarding the organisms which they have proved or all but proved to be the determining causes of other diseases. Thus in Italy Dr. Tomassi Crudelli has shewn that the organism of the malarial fever of the Campagna has its breeding ground in the soil. Professor Koch has proved that the comma

*Consular Reports Commercial 26, 1883.

bacillus, the specific organism of cholera can, under suitable conditions of moisture and temperature flourish luxuriantly on earth, and according to a recent paper by M. Chantemessi the microbe which gives rise to Typhoid Fever retains its vitality in damp ground, and, as fatal experience has often shown, develops freely in water.*

Now the number of diseases which there is reason to believe are due to the invasion of the human body by micro-organisms of different sorts is very great, and although their identification and the study of their life-history has in very few cases been made with the accuracy attained by M. Pasteur in connection with the organism of cattle-anthrax, yet judging by analogy and by the mode in which they are known to spread, there can be no reasonable doubt that the practice of depositing in the earth-often at shallow depths, and soon to be disturbed-bodies laden with disease-producing organisms, must be fraught with danger, and that the drainage from churchyards, independent of its repulsive and unsavoury nature, must form a source of great peril whenever it finds its way into water supplies. That abundant opportunity exists for such a mode of water contamination in country districts must be evident to any one who has observed the close proximity to churchyards, in which, in country districts wells are often placed, but I may quote one single instance, as a sample of the dangers that may exist in connection with even modern Metropolitan cemeteries. In 1874, an official investigation took place into the condition of Tooting Cemetery. 'In the course of the enquiry it was elicited that the entire drainage of the cemetery was conducted into a neighbouring ditch which discharged itself into the river Wandle, from which many of the inhabitants in its vicinity were accustomed to draw supplies of water.' What the nature of that drainage must have been we may conceive from a statement made by Mr. Baldwin Latham, M.I.C.E. (London), in the course of a discussion on cremation at the 1886 Congress of the Sanitary

*British Medical Journal, 9th April, 1887.

+Pall Mall Gazette, 18th Nov., 1874.