170 SIR WILLIAM FLOWER CHAP. 



Mr. Seymour Hayden's proposal that the bodies of 

 the dead should be committed to the earth in wicker 

 coffins. 



" I need not shock your readers (he wrote in the Times) by 

 attempting to describe the condition of bodies which have lain 

 for years in a more or less perfectly closed coffin, but on the other 

 hand I can affirm from considerable experience that such is the 

 disinfecting power of earth that the necessary changes in the dis- 

 solution of the human body occur under its influence in the least 

 offensive and injurious manner. Decay in earth, in fact, is quite a 

 different matter from decay in water or air. Not many years ago 

 it was my duty to superintend digging up the body of a whale 

 which had been buried for two years in a sandy soil on the 

 Norfolk coast. So far from the process being, as I anticipated 

 from my experience of much more recent whales' carcasses, very 

 unpleasant, the bones were found nearly clean, and quite 

 odourless." 



Three years after that in which he visited 

 North Repps he secured for the Hunterian 

 Museum the skeleton of a right whale from 

 Copenhagen. In the September following he 

 visited the Museum at Leyden and Utrecht to 

 measure whales' skeletons, and also went to Louvain 

 " to retake " notes he had lost on the same sub- 

 ject. Later he communicated the results of these 

 visits to the Zoological Society by reading a 

 paper on the Skeletons of Whales in the Prin- 

 cipal Museums of Holland and Belgium, with 

 descriptions of two species apparently new to 

 science. 



In the following June he went to Burton Con- 

 stable, on the Yorkshire coast, near Hull, where a 



