21 



I have myself always had a peculiar horror of the danger of being 

 buried alive. That this is no mere idiosyncrasy is witnessed by 

 curious provisions in \vills, by which men have endeavoured to 

 guard against this possibility. I will not make your hair stand 

 on end by recitals of what has been discovered in opening up 

 graves, of instances in which the unhappy victims of too speedy 

 interment have been found to have lived again. Probably the 

 possibility has given rise to the mischievous practice of the long 

 delay between death and interment, which, in the families of 

 the poor, is a really terrible evil. But I will note the fact that 

 tlie daughter of Henry Laurens, President of the American 

 Congress, was only by accident saved from the fate. She had, 

 as it was supposed, died of small-pox, when the windows being 

 opened to ventilate the room, the draught most happily revived 

 her, and saved her from the fate of an unrighteous vestal virgin. 



I shall have more to say of the way in which cremation 

 would indirectly make the registration of death more exact, but 

 the process would at least prevent the horrible after-consequences 

 of a mistake, which has so dwelt on the minds of men that 

 they have left orders that their bodies should be boiled, stabbed, 

 or post-mortemed, in order to prevent such a mishap. 



But perhaps I have said enough as regards the social aspect 

 let me now proceed to the sanitary question, for I must deal 

 Avith this at some length, and yet leave myself room to answer 

 some of the stock objections to this resort to a practice so old 

 that it has become forgotten, and is now looked on as an innova- 

 tion. That the bodies of the dead are sources of iU-health to 

 the living, was abundantly proved by the Report on Extramural 

 Interment, signed by the late Lord Carlisle, the present Earl of 

 Shaftesbury (then Lord Ashley), Edwin Chad^vick, and Dr. South- 

 wood Smith, in 1850. The evidence was so overwhelming that 

 burials within towns were for the future forbidden, though with 

 such tenderness for prejudice, that burials are still allowed even 

 in such places as Greenwich. But two facts were then unknown, 

 or little known; one of which has become of the first sanitary 

 importance, and another is fast rising to equal importance. The 

 fact that the virus of disease was chiefly communicable in water 



