therefore made room by actual pressure, though such poisonous exhalations were disengaged by the operation, that even these incarnate ghowls themselves were compelled to rush out of the church, and let the insupportable odour diffuse itself, before they could replace the stone. It is true, that nothing so indecent as this has happened or could be suffered in England; yet in large towns, and more especially in the metropolis, it has become more difficult to find room for the dead than for the living. The Commissioners for the Improvements in Westminster reported to Parliament in 1814, that St. Margaret's churchyard could not, consistently with the health of the neighbourhood, be used much longer as a burying ground, for that it was with the greatest difficulty a vacant place could at any time be found for strangers; the family graves generally would not admit of more than one interment; and many of them were then too full, for the reception of any member of the family to which they belonged.' There are many churchyards in which the soil has been raised several feet above the level of the adjoining street, by the continual accumulation of mortal matter; and there are others, in which the ground is actually probed with a borer before a grave is opened! In these things the most barbarous savages might reasonably be shocked at our barbarity. Many tons of human bones every year are sent from London to the north,* where they are crushed in mills contrived for the purpose, and used as manure. Yet with all this clearance the number of the dead increases in such frightful disproportion to the space which we allot for them, that the question has been started whether a sexton may not refuse to admit iron coffins into a burial place, because by this means, the deceased take a fee-simple in the ground which was only granted for a term of years! The patentee accordingly assures the public that, he has taken Dr. Jenner's opinion (of Doctors Commons) upon the point, which is that no legal objection can be made to the interment of dead bodies on account of the materials whereof the coffins in which they are deposited may be composed.' A curious expedient has been found at Shields and Sunderland: the ships which return to those ports in ballast were at a loss where to discharge it, and had of late years been compelled to pay for the use of the ground on which they threw it out: the burial grounds were full; it was recollected that the ballast would be useful there, and accordingly it has been laid upon one layer of dead to such a depth, that graves for a second tier are now dug in the new soil. Fifty years ago a French writer said that the expenses of inter * The eagerness of English agriculturists to obtain this manure (human bones), and the cupidity of foreigners in supplying it, is such as to induce the latter to rob the tombs of their forefathers. Bones of all descriptions are imported, and pieces of halfdecayed coffin attire are found among them.'-Letter from Grimsby in Lincolnshire. ment ment in London were greatly increased by the necessity of digging the graves deep, for the sake of security from the surgeons. Ames the antiquary, from some such feeling, was deposited in the churchyard of St. George's in the East, in what is called virgin earth, at the depth of eight feet, and in a stone coffin. A fatal accident occurred at Clerkenwell a few years ago in digging a grave to a greater depth than this; the sides fell in, and buried the labourer. Yet there has existed a prejudice against new churchyards! No person was interred in the cemetery of 'St. George's, Queen Square, till the ground was broken for Mr. Nelson, the well known religious writer: his character for piety reconciled others to the spot. People like to be buried in company, and in good company. The dissenters talk of the funeral honours of Bunhill Fields,' which are their Campo Santo. Messrs. Bogue and Bennet call it, that first of repositories of the dead in Christ, which will at the resurrectionof the just give up so many bodies of the saints to be made like to the glorious body of the Redeemer.' John Bunyan was buried there; and so numerous,' says the Barrister, have been and still are, the dying requests of his idolaters to be buried as near as possible to the place of his interment, that it is not now possible to obtain a grave near him, the whole surrounding earth being entirely preoccupied by dead bodies to a very considerable distance.' 6 The excellent Evelyn regretted greatly that after the fire of London advantage had not been taken of that calamity to rid the city of its burial places, and establish a necropolis without the walls. I yet cannot but deplore,' says he in his Silva, that when that spacious area was so long a rasa tabula, the churchyards had not been banished to the north walls of the city, where a grated inclosure of competent breadth for a mile in length might have served for an universal cemetery to all the parishes, distinguished by the like separations, and with ample walks of trees, the walks adorned with monuments, inscriptions and titles, apt for contemplation and memory of the defunct, and that wise and excellent law of the Twelve Tables restored and renewed.' Such a funeral grove, with proper regulations and careful keeping, would have been an ornament and an honour to the metropolis, and might at this time have been as characteristic of the English as the Catacombs at Paris are of the French. Wretchedly as London is provided with cemeteries, Paris was in a much worse state before its quarries were converted into receptacles for the remains of the dead. For many centuries that great city had only one churchyard, that of St. Innocent's, originally a piece of the royal domains lying without the walls, and given by one of the first French kings as a burial place to the citizens, in an age when interments within the city were forbidden. Philip Augustus Augustus inclosed it in 1186 with high walls, because it had been made a place of the grossest debauchery, and the gates were closed at night. About forty years afterwards the Bishop of Paris, Pierre de Nemours, enlarged it, and from that time no further enlargement of its precincts was ever made. The manner in which the dead were heaped there is noticed thus oddly by the old poet Jean Le Fevre, who lived in the reign of Charles V: Car Atropos la male gloute Je ne veuil pas qu'elle me boute In 1440 the Bishop of Paris, Denis des Moulins, raised the burial fees, at which the people murmured, and resented the imposition, as they deemed it, so strongly, that they entered into a combination, and during four months no person was buried there, and no funeral service performed over those who died, a revenge for which the bishop excommunicated them all. This quarrel did not continue long, and as generations after generations were piled one upon another within the same ground, the inhabitants of the neighbouring parishes began to complain of the great inconvenience and danger to which they were exposed; diseases were imputed to such a mass of collected putridity, tainting the air by exhalations, and the waters by filtration, and measures for clearing out the cemetery would have been taken in the middle of the sixteenth century, if some disputes between the bishop and the parliament had not prevented them. To save the credit of the burial-ground a marvellous power of consumning bodies in the short space of nine days was imputed to it, as Hentzner tells us when he describes the place as sepulchrorum numero et scelestis admirandum. The mode of interment was of the most indecent kind, not in single graves but in common pits. I am astonished,' says Philip Thicknesse writing from Paris, that where such an infinite number of people live in so small a compass, they should suffer the dead to be buried in the manner they do, or within the city. There are several burial pits in Paris, of a prodigious size and depth, in which the dead bodies are laid side by side, without any earth being put over them till the ground tier is full; then, and not till then, a small layer of earth covers them, and another layer of dead comes on, till, by layer upon layer, and dead upon dead, the hole is filled with a mass of human corruption, enough to breed a plague. These places are inclosed, it is true, within high walls; but, nevertheless, the air cannot be improved by it. The burials in churches too often often prove fatal to the priests and people who attend; but every body and every thing in Paris is so much alive that not a soul thinks about the dead.' Mr. Thicknesse was mistaken in one point, —there was no intermediate earth between the layers of the coffins : they were closely packed, one tier above another, in pits thirty feet deep and twenty square, and when the pit was full it was covered with a layer of soil, not more than a foot in thickness. These fosses communes were emptied once in thirty or forty years, and the bones deposited in what was called Le Grand Charnier des Innocens, an arched gallery which surrounded the burial-place, having been erected at different times, as a work of piety, by different citizens, whose names, and sometimes their escutcheons, were placed upon the parts which they had founded. One of these pits, which was intended to contain two thousand bodies, having been opened in 1779, the inhabitants of the adjoining streets presented a memorial to the Lieutenant-General of the Police; they stated that the soil of the burial-ground was raised more than eight feet above the level of the streets and the ground-floor of the adjacent houses, and represented that serious consequences had been experienced in the cellars of some of the houses. The evil indeed was now become so great that it could not longer be borne. The last gravedigger, François Pontraci, had, by his own register, in less than thirty years, deposited more than 90,000 bodies in that cemetery : for many years the average number of interments there had been not less than 3000, and of these from 150 to 200 at the utmost were all that had separate graves: the rest were laid in the common trenches, which were usually made to hold from 12 to 1500! It was calculated that since the time of Philippe Auguste 1,200,000 bodies had been interred there, and it had been in use as a cemetery many ages before his time. The A memorial upon the ill effects which had arisen, and the worse consequences which might be expected to arise from the constant accumulation of putrescence was read before the Royal Academy of Science, in 1783, by M. Cadet de Vaux, who held the useful office of Inspecteur Général des Objets de Salubrité. Council of State in 1785 decreed that the cemetery should be cleared of its dead, and converted into a market-place, after the canonical forms which were requisite in such cases should have been observed: the archbishop, in conformity, issued a decree for the suppression, demolition and evacuation of the cemetery, directing that the bones and bodies should be removed to the new subterranean cemetery of the Plaine de Mont Rouge, and appointing one of his vicars-general to draw up the procès-verbal of the exhumation, removal, and reinterment; and the Royal Society of Medicine appointed a committee to explain the plans which should VOL. XXI. NO. XLII. BB be 1 be presented for this extraordinary operation, and superintended a work as interesting to men of science as it would have been shocking to common spectators. It is well known that the substance which is denominated Adipocire was then scientifically re-discovered: re-discovered, we say, because the existence of the substance had been known by Sir Thomas Brown, and a mode of preparing it by Lord Bacon; and scientifically, because the fact had long been familiar to the grave-diggers in Paris, and also among the lower classes in this country. We ourselves well remember the prejudice which existed among them against using spermaceti in medicine, before the discovery was made at Paris, because they said it was dead men's fat. At Paris it was believed that the transmutation took place only in the common pit where the dead were buried in masses; but it is evident that it occurs also in single graves; it is however very possible that the process may be contagious. And it cannot be doubted but that worse consequences than were actually experienced from the horrible accumulation of corpses in the cemetery of St. Innocent must have resulted if the bodies had not undergone this change. The common people of Paris regarded this burial-place with so much veneration that some danger was apprehended, if any accident should provoke their irritable feelings during an exposure which no precaution could prevent from being shocking to humanity. Every possible precaution however was taken. The work went on by night and day without intermission, till it was necessarily suspended during the hot months; and it was resumed with the same steady exertion as soon as the season permitted. Religious ceremonies had not at that time lost their effect upon the Parisian mob: and the pomp with which some of the remains were removed, and the decent and religious care with which the bones and undistinguished remains were conveyed away, reconciled them to the measure. The night-scenes, when the work was carried on by the light of torches and bonfires, are said to have been of the most impressive character,-crosses, monuments, demolished edifices, excavations, and coffins,-and the labourers moving about like spectres in the lurid light, under a cloud of smoke. M. Robert, and other distinguished artists of that day, painted some of these scenes,-in French phrase, avec la plus grande expression et l'harmonie la plus sentimentale. It fortunately happened that there was no difficulty in finding a proper receptacle for the remains thus disinterred. No great shock is wanting,' says Prudhomme,' to throw down all the stones of Paris into the place from whence they were quarried. The towers and domes and steeples are so many signs which tell the beholder that whatever he sees above his head has been taken from under |
