If

There was nothing of this sort in St. Cuthbert's, nothing to compare even with the state of matters which Dr. Sutherland reported to exist in some of the older Scottish churchyards; nothing like the churchyard at Hawick of which he speaks, where the graves contained so much water that the Episcopal clergyman generally got his surplice splashed when the coffin was lowered into the grave, or in Greenock, where he saw coffins containing decaying bodies exposed to the air and light, and was sensible of the most horrible smells escaping from them, and where in another part of the ground he saw human remains unburied, and heaps of broken up coffins and fragments of shrouds lying mixed together. Compared with these examples taken haphazard from many similar ones to be found recorded in the Board of Health's Report, St. Cuthbert's might almost be looked upon as a model cemetery. occasional mistakes' were made in breaking open coffins the contents of which were not 'ripe,' there was none of that boring with an iron rod-'searcher' is I believe the technical name for the implement-to ascertain where the processes of decay had created room for another interment which, judging from the frequency with which it is alluded to in published reports, appears to be an all but universal feature of burialground administration. The grounds were neatly kept, and if the dead were turned out of their coffins at the end of a few years, that is the almost universal fate of our city poor. Even as to the burning of coffins, I find that one of the witnesses in the case the Medical Officer of Health of Glasgow-is reported to have stated in evidence that he had little doubt the same practice prevailed in the city with which he was officially connected, and judging from a communication published in Land and Water* a few years ago, the same expedient is not unknown at the present day in the English metropolis. At least the writer of that communication gives a circumstantial account of an interview with a young man whose father had for many years worked in the Metropolitan cemetery to which their conversation referred, in the course of which his

* Quoted in God's Acre Beautiful, page 84,

informant, after describing the difference between 'privates' and 'commonses,' (persons buried in private and common graves) is stated to have gone on to say: 'You should go in there of a night and see them burning the bones and coffins. You see they dig up the "commonses" every twelve year, (of course they dare not interfere with the "privates") and what they find left of them they burn.' Incredible! Incredible! may be your exclamation. Impossible that such proceedings could go on in London without exposure. Why so? We have seen how similar things went on unchallenged for fifteen years in Edinburgh.

It may be said these repulsive practices existed and can exist only in connection with the burial of the poor, who cannot afford to buy the freeholds of their graves, and that the well-to-do need not concern themselves about them. But it must be remembered that the poor compose the great mass of our population, and the proper disposal of their remains constitutes the chief portion of our burial problem, and although when buried out of our sight, we may trouble ourselves no more about them, any violation of the laws of health incurred in connection with them is certain to be visited not only upon their own class but also upon their richer neighbours.

But even the rich must not flatter themselves that they can under our present system deposit their dead to sleep the last sleep under conditions pleasant for the minds of those who cared for them in life to contemplate. I might prove this by many illustrations almost as unpleasant to reflect on as those which I have quoted in the case of the dead poor, but one need not go further than the practice of those who are rich enough to pay for indulgence of their sentiments in the matter of the disposal of their dead, to see that the custom of earth interment is repellant to a large number of them. Those to whom money is not an object, do not as a rule bury their dead in graves. They box them up in leaden coffins and deposit them in vaults. Do they thereby ensure to their death-sleep surroundings more free from those grosser incidents which, were they known or thought of, would shock the sentiments of

the survivors? If any one believes so, and would know the truth, let him read the report of the Board of Health to which I have before referred. There he will find recorded the history of corruption in these whited sepulchres with a business-like, matter-of-fact directness which will speedily dispel his cherished delusions. He will learn that occasionally, even in the case of strong leaden coffins, the gases generated by putrefaction burst the metal case with a noise like the report of a gun; that the acrid fluids sometimes set up a galvanic action between the solder and the lead, corroding the metal into holes through which products of corruption distil; that when the leaden cases have remained perfect, at the end of half a century their contents have been found to consist of a couple of gallons of 'a coffee-coloured ammoniacal fluid' in which the bones lay immersed; that the external wooden boxes in which they are encased-especially in ill-ventilated vaults-speedily become reduced to powder through the ravages of the Rhynocolus Lignarius, or Elm Weevil, a dark, piceous coloured insect about a sixth of an inch in length' which multiplies and feeds upon the wood until its fibre is destroyed, and that, deprived of its support and weighed down by the accumulation of fresh coffins placed upon them, the leaden cases are by degrees 'driven into the ground and pressed quite flat.'

6

But at all events the remains of the rich, of the possessors of private graves and of vaults, are allowed to remain undisturbed. Their friends and relations enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that where pious hands have placed them, there their bones will rest until the world's end comes. Even that satisfaction the teachings of experience prove to be illusory.*

* In illustration of this I might refer to the case of a deceased Scottish nobleman, the felonious abstraction of whose body from the family vault a few years ago caused much excitement, and may quote the following paragraph which appeared in the Globe newspaper of 15th of last April :NEW YORK, April 15.

'The remains of ex-President Lincoln have been removed from the secret grave in which they were deposited at Springfield, Illinois, and have been reburied with those of his wife in the same cemetery. The object of the secret burial was to prevent the body being stolen, and the exact spot was for several years known only to a few persons.'

The ancient Egyptians of all nations took the greatest pains to secure their dead against the ravages of decay and disturbance by unfriendly hands, and with what result?

'The other day,'-some years ago wrote a correspondent of The Times from Alexandria,—The other day at Sakhara I saw nine camels pacing down from the mummy pits to the bank of the river, laden with nets in which were femora, tibiæ, and other bony bits of the human form, some two hundred weight in each net on each side of the camel. Among the pits there were people busily employed in searching out, sifting and sorting the bones which almost crust the ground. On enquiry I learned that the cargoes with which the camels were laden would be sent down to Alexandria and thence shipped to English manure manufacturers. They make excellent manure, I am told, particularly for Swedes and other turnips. The trade is brisk, and has been going on for many years.'

But Great Britain is not Egypt! No; in this country events march quicker. The last Annual Report of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, an association having for its object, among other things, the securing of disused burial grounds in London for use as public gardens, contains an interesting analysis of the present condition of 443 burial grounds which exist or have existed within the Metropolitan area. From this it seems that 116 of the number have entirely disappeared, their sites being now occupied by buildings of all kinds-railway lines, docks, streets, etc.; that 38 more have been turned into private gardens, playgrounds for schools, stoneyards, builders' yards, stable-yards, or vacant building sites. How many thousands of tons of human debris must have been carted, one knows not whither, in the course of the operations. which these figures indicate.

I have not attempted to exhaust the revelations that have been made in connection with many of our British burying grounds. Some of them are so exceptional and some so repulsive that it would serve no good purpose to quote them. But I think I have said enough to shew that it is not without good reason that many thinking and intelligent men and

women regard with deep aversion a system of disposing of the dead, involving exposure to so much against which the finer feelings of human nature revolt; a system under which the duty of the living is held to end when the dead are handed over to the slow operation of underground decay. I have said enough to explain why many would fain find refuge from such a system in cremation, in which, by the infinitely purer and less revolting method of disintegration by flame, the result that otherwise drags on its progress over fifty years, is condensed into about as many minutes, and the care of the living is not suspended or relaxed until the dead has been resolved into imperceptible gases and an urnful of glistening ashes and calcined bones.

But it is not on sentimental grounds alone or principally that the advocates of the change object to the present system of burial. The strongest objection of those of them who are most competent to speak on the subject of public health is based on the danger to public health which the present system presents. Recent experiments of Pettenkoffer prove that gases impelled by no more violent force than that afforded by variations in the atmospheric pressure and by fluctuations of temperature, travel with the greatest ease not only through certain soils but through various cements and mortars which would be at first sight considered to present an insuperable obstacle in their path. Long before this fact was generally known, Professor (now Sir Lyon) Playfair had, as the result of the examination of numerous burial grounds, found that not only was the layer of earth over the bodies insufficient in many cases to arrest the diffusion of foetid exhalations, but that gases with similar odours were evolved from the sides of sewers distant sometimes as much as thirty feet. These facts render it easy to understand the cases of fresh dug graves being filled with deadly vapours, and the houses in the neighbourhood of burial grounds being permeated with unhealthy and disgusting odours, of which so many examples are to be found in the literature of the subject.

But it has only recently become known that specific diseases are due to the invasion of the body by minute living organ