MODE OF DISPOSING OF OUR DEAD. 
259 
where they died, and for ten or twelve years this pasture was 
not used; but when it was, sheep began to die of anthrax, 
although none existed in the neighborhood. Pasteur demon¬ 
strated that the disease had been brought to the surface by 
earth worms, from the remains of the previous cases. Many 
cases are recorded where sickness and death resulted from 
the use of water near cemeteries; and almost any physician 
can testify that in case of an outbreak of disease, it is invari¬ 
ably the worst near a grave yard. Within a radius of ten 
miles of the City Hall of New York, dwell about three mil¬ 
lion people, with an annual death-rate of sixty thousand, which, 
if we allow for quick computation one hundred pounds to the 
body, gives them the enormous quantity of thiee thousand 
tons annually of decomposing material to be disposed of, and 
Dr. Parker says that every putrefying human body will give 
off annually about fifty feet of carbonic acid gas: so you can 
imagine the purity of the air in and about the neighborhood 
of thickly populated cemeteries, without considering the pol¬ 
lution of the earth and water, and the danger existing from 
contagious or infectious diseases. 
Philadelphia has eighty thousand graves so located that 
they drain into the city’s water supply, and Philadelphia is 
not the only city with the same trouble. 
These things do not form a pleasant subject to contem¬ 
plate, but they still remain facts. 
Dr. J. D. Beagless says that in Calvary cemetery of New 
York, in the public part, a trench is dug, seven feet wide, ten 
or twelve feet deep, and of indefinite length, in which the 
coffins are stowed away tier upon tier, making a flight of steps 
five or more deep, and with not sufficient earth to hide one 
layer from the next. Dr. Felix Formeto states that in New 
Orleans, where subsoil water is often found a few inches fiom 
the surface, and the soil of such a nature as to absoib and 
retain all sorts of poisonous matter, that they have there 
adopted a method of burial, which is carried out with very 
few exceptions, described as follows : Instead of the corpse 
being deposited in the ground it is placed in tombs or 
oven-like places above ground, generally badly constructed 
