CHEMICAL SCIENCE. 227 



same putrid exhalations are given out. Further, slaughter-houses', which, 

 according to theory, ought to be centres of pestilence and fever, have been 

 singularly exempt from them, as was noticed during the plague and during 

 the cholera. Dr. Tweedie says : " Though ever}' description of mechanic 

 was at some period or other admitted last year into the Fever Hospital, I do 

 not recollect a single instance of a butcher being sent to the establishment." 

 The perfume of the graveyard is far from agreeable, and graveyards have 

 for some years been regarded as centres of pestilence and fever. When pes- 

 tilence and fever are raging in a district, it is not difficult, of course, to find 

 that a graveyard is somewhere close at hand ; but this is extremely imperfect 

 evidence of any necessary connection between the two ; and it becomes still 

 more suspicious when we find that at Bridgetown, Barbadoes, eight thou- 

 sand bodies were buried in six weeks in a space of two acres, yet neither 

 fever nor any other disease attacked the inhabitants afterwards. The same 

 remark applies to nearly all the large towns in the West Indies, in conse- 

 quence of the practice of burying cholera victims in one spot. In the burial- 

 grounds near Seville, ten thousand bodies had been recently interred, 

 when, in 1800, the French government sent a commission to inquire into the 

 cause of yellow fever; and although a fetid odor was exhaled from the de- 

 composing bodies, no ill result followed to the thousands of the inhabitants 

 who went daily to visit the graves of their relatives and friends. And what 

 shall we say to the Cemetery of the Innocents at Paris? In the course of 

 thirty years, ninety thousand bodies had been buried there by one grave- 

 digger, and it was calculated that more than six hundred thousand bodies 

 had been buried there during the six previous centuries. In a space not 

 exceeding two acres, it had been the custom to bury the bodies of the 

 poor in common pits, and they were placed so close to each other as to 

 be only separated by planks of six lines each. These pits were twenty 

 feet wide and twenty deep, and each contained ten to fifteen hundred bodies. 

 It is difficult to understand how Paris escaped from continuous attacks of 

 cholera, and how the grave-digger managed to breathe this atmosphere 

 during thirty 5 T ears, if grave-yard exhalations are the fatal poisons they are 

 declared to be. 



* 



The authority of Duchatelet is invoked in a very striking case. At Mont- 

 faucon, in Paris, there is one of the most extensive knacker-yards in the 

 world, Thousands of horses, dogs, and cats are slaughtered there, the 

 flesh and offal, after the animals are skinned, being allowed to remain and 

 putrefy for the purpose of manure. " Every one," says Duchatelet, " can 

 examine the fetid odor produced by heaps of flesh left to putrefy for months 

 in the open air, and in the heat of the sun; to which must be added the 

 gases given out from mountains of skeletons not properly cleansed from the 

 soft parts, and the emanations arising from a soil saturated from year to 

 year with blood and animal liquids. But, if you interrogate the numerous 

 workmen who belong to the establishment, they will answer that they are 

 never ill, and that the effluvia which they inhale, far from injuring them, 

 contributes to keep them in good health. If you examine them you will see 

 they have all the appearance of the most perfect health. The robust health 

 of the wife and five children of Friand were remarkable, for they had all the 

 year worked and slept in a place which was actually unapproachable to the 

 members of the commission, on account of the stench." He also notices 

 the longevity of those knackers. " Many of them are sixty or seventy years 

 old, quite robust and active. Inquiries showed tbat their parents died at an 



