CREMATION*. 749 



The soil of crowded cemeteries — and they all get crowded 

 sooner or later— is liable to get saturated with decomposing 

 organic matter. There is no seciu'ity for the destruction of 

 disease germs which may have infected and multiplied in the 

 body while living, and which may even have been the cause 

 of death. On the contrary, the evidence available points to 

 the preservative action of the earth on disease spores. Pasteur 

 has the strongest evidence in support of this contention in 

 the disease known as the cattle anthrax. Animals which 

 have died of this disease and have been buried become, after 

 a time (a year or two), a source of infection to others that are 

 healthy, but which might graze over the burying ground or 

 in the immediate vicinity. This result is brought about most 

 likely through the agency of earth-worms, which ingest the 

 anthrax spores with their proper food and bring them to the 

 surface, where they are readily formed in the casts. They 

 can be discovered in the alimentary tract of the worm also. 

 The spores getting on the herbage or in the water infect 

 healthy cattle, which become similarly diseased. 



In the year 1883 a Brazilian physician showed that yellow 

 fever is caused by a micro-organism ( Cryptococcus zantho- 

 genicusj which, like the Bacillus anthracis, could be cultivated 

 outside the body. It was found in tlie secretions and 

 excretions of patients suffering with the disease. 



He visited a cemetery where, about a year before, a person 

 dead from yellow fever had been buried, and took away some 

 soil a foot under the surface, and over the grave. The 

 cryptococcus was plentifully found in it and then cultivated 

 on gelatine and inoculated into guinea pigs : yellow fever was 

 produced. Other guinea pigs confined in a small space near 

 some of the same soil took tlie disease. This investigation of 

 Dr. Friere is suggestive of serious doubt if earth burial is a 

 proper proceeding in other infectious diseases. 



It is not hard to imagine — and it may yet be ])roved — that 

 in infectious diseases generally the burial of the dead leads to 

 contamination of the soil, and possibly the air or water where 

 the conditions are favourable. 



The specific micro-organisms of diphtheria, typhoid fever, 

 malarial fever appear, so far as investigations have gone, to 

 survive in the damp soil. 



Why is inhumation so generally in favour? It seems to 

 be chiefly so as the natural outcome of long established 

 custom, which has reconciled the living to the practice as the 

 least repugnant to their feelings. Certain religious beliefs, 



