334 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



moral sense, that its adoption would be an eternal disgrace to Ameri- 

 can jurisprudence. The establisliment of a right so sacred and pre- 

 cious ought not to need any judicial precedent. Our courts of justice 

 should place it, at once, where it should fundamentally rest forever, 

 on the deepest and most unerring instincts of human nature, and hold 

 it to be a self-evident right of humanity, entitled to legal j^rotection, 

 by every consideration of feeling, decency, and Christian duty. The 

 world does not contain a tribunal that would {)unish a son who should 

 resist, even unto death, any attempt to mutilate his father's corpse, or 

 tear it iyom. the grave for sale or dissection ; but where would he find 

 tlie legal right to resist, except in his peculiar and exclusive interest 

 in the body ? 



The right to the repose of the grave necessarily implies the right to 

 its exclusive possession. The doctrine of the legal right to open a 

 grave in a cemetery, after a certain lapse of time, to receive another 

 tenant, however it may be sanctioned by custom in the English 

 church-yards, or by Continental usage at Pere-la-Chaise and else- 

 where, will hardly become acceptable to the American mind, still less 

 the Italian practice of hastening the decomposition of the dead by cor- 

 rosive elements. The right to the individuality of a grave, if it exist 

 at all, evidently must continue, so long as the remains of the occupant 

 can be identified and the means of identifying can only be secured 

 and preserved by separate burial. The due and decent preservation 

 of human remains by separate burial is preeminently due to Christian 

 civilization, which, bringing in the cofiin and sarcophagus, superseded 

 the heathen custom of burning, and " gave," in Lord Stoweli's vivid 

 phrase, " final extinction to the sepulchral bonfires." 



THE EELATIOXS OF WOMEX TO CRIME. 



By ELY VAN DE "WAEKEE, M. D. 



II. 



I SHALL, in this paper, consider briefly the sexual and other physi- 

 cal and mental conditions which modify woman's relations to 

 crime. These conditions {S) mainly depend upon 1. Age; 2. Hered- 

 ity ; 3. Physical ; and 4. Mental sexual peculiarities. In a former paper 

 of this series,' I believe I proved, beyond a doubt, that there are types of 

 mind which are purely the outcome of sex, and which define the men- 

 tal condition of the sexes. In that paper, criminal statistics were 

 used to assist in establishing the fact of sexual mental dilFerences. 

 Here the method is reversed, and sexual mental traits are employed 

 to explain the known differences in the extent and degree of crime 

 ' Popular Science Monthly, July, 1875. 



