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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
The advantages urged against simple burial in the earth are, 
(a) that such mode of burial is injurious to the living; (6) 
that the earth becomes impregnated with the remains of the 
dead, and that sometimes the very water which filtrates 
through such earth becomes the drinking-water of communi- 
ties ; (c) that from the graveyards there arise offensive gaseous 
emanations which, breathed by the living, are sources of dis- 
ease ; (cZ) that old burial-places, if they become unearthed, 
are possible sources of contagion ; that the contagious matter 
buried with the dead who have died of pestilence, though 
remaining harmless while stored up in the earth, may, if set 
free by the removal of the earth, be disseminated amongst the 
living to distribute once more the poisons of the spreading 
disease; ( e ) that the thought of the dead undergoing slow 
decomposition in the earth during long periods of time is, when 
it is brought before the mind so as to be fully realised, of all 
thoughts most repugnant and terrible. 
If all these charges against the ordinary mode of burial 
were really true and unavoidable, little could be said in its 
favour. It really happens that none of them are necessarily 
true. It may be that in some instances too close proximity 
of the home of the dead to the home of the living has 
been hurtful. I was once consulted on the subject of the 
supply of water to a town in which an impure supply was 
derived because it had filtered through an old burial ground. 
But the error was soon amended, as others might be with 
equal ease when they occur. The objection against the ema- 
nations from graveyards is equally removable. By a bad 
social arrangement, by placing a graveyard in the midst of 
a crowded population, and by super-filling it with dead, much 
harm may and possibly has been done ; but there is no 
need for any such an outrage ; no more need than for piling 
up combustible matter in the heart of a town or city. To 
remove the dead a distance of even a mile from the living, and 
to bury them properly, in sufficient space, is in truth all that 
the most rigid sanitarian can reasonably desire. Who in our 
large cemeteries or in our village burying-grounds, where 
proper order and decency prevail, ever found the existence of a 
dangerous emanation from the dead ? What evidence is there 
anywhere of one single instance of a contagious or epidemic 
disease derived from such a source ? On the contrary, the 
entire absence of propagation of contagious disease from the 
cemeteries of such a city as London, is the best and surest 
proof that the system of burial in the earth is unexceptionable 
as a means for the final burial of contagion. 
The statement that the poisons of the contagious diseases 
have been set at liberty by the reopening of old burial-grounds 
