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To strengthen this general position it will be sufficient to quote the familiar, but weighty assertion of Sir Henry Thompson: "No dead body is ever placed in the soil without polluting the earth, the air, and the water above it;" and the testimony of Dr. Holland, who speaks as opponent of this reform and the antagonist of Sir Henry Thompson, that the best situated cemeteries may be so mismanaged as to become unsafe; that cemeteries should not be too near dwellings; that they should not be overcrowded; that the soakage from them should be carfully guarded against; and that wells near burial grounds are unfit sources of drinking water; and the declaration of the French Academy of Medicine, that the cemeteries of Pere-la-Chaise, Montmartre, and Montparnasse, once suburban now intramural, are the cause of serious disorders of the head and throat and lungs, that result in the loss of many lives; and to note the experience of Brooklyn, half-girdled with graves, of which the editor of The Sanitarian does not hesitate to assert: "Typhoid fever is, taking one year with another, increasingly prevalent in Brooklyn, and it is, in our judgment, probably due for the most part to sewage-pollution of the intensest and most loathsome kind- the seepage of graveyards!"

Thus far this subject has been treated as though the only evil influence that a decomposing body could exert would be through the poisonous character of the resultant compounds. Unhappily, the story is only partly told, and greater dangers remain to be revealed.

*

Within a few years it has become unquestioned that some of the deadliest diseases that attack mankind owe their origin and propagation to living organisms, and it may yet appear that the field of their operations is far wider than we now think. Not to attempt to tell all that has been ascertained, it will be sufficiently convincing to quote from Sir Henry Thompson's utterance in the Nineteenth Century, in 1880: "I state, as a fact of the highest importance, that, by burial in the earth, we effectively provide― whatever sanitary precautions are taken by ventilation and drainage, whatever disinfection is applied after contagion has occurred that the pestilential germs which have destroyed the body in question are thus so treasured and protected as to propagate and multiply, ready to reappear and work like ruin hereafter for others. * Beside anthrax, or splenic fever, spores from which are notoriously brought to the surface from buried animals below and become fatal to the herds feeding there, it is now almost certain that malarious diseases, notably Roman fever and even tetanus, are due to bacteria which flourish in the soil itself. The poisons of scarlet fever, enteric fever (typhoid), small-pox, diphtheria, and malignant cholera are undoubtedly transmissible through earth from the buried body." That the burial of a body that contains the seeds of zymotic disease is simply storing them for future reproduction and destruction, is amply proven by the researches of Darwin and Pasteur, of whom the former has shown that the mould, or fertile upper layer of superficial soil, has largely acquired its character by its passage through the digestive track of earth-worms, and the latter, that this mould, when brought by this agency to the surface from

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subjacent soil that has been used as a grave, contains the specific germ of the disease that destroyed its tenant.

We may fitly close this portion of the discussion with the conclusion, so strongly stated by Dr. James M. Kellar, in his report to the session of the American Public Health Association, at St. Louis, in 1884, which is far from

"CAMPO SANTO," ANGLE OF CLOISTER.

an over statement of the truth: "We believe the horrid practice of earth burial does more to propagate the germs of disease and death, and to spread desolation and pestilence over the human race, than all man's ingenuity and ignorance in every other custom."

It may now be asked: "Granting that these evils are inseparable from the burial of the dead in the earth or in tombs, what is the remedy? What else can be done?"

Intramural Cemeteries.

To this question not many answers can be given, because the modes of disposing of the dead have always been and must always be few.

Plainly, no such novel mode as casting the dead into the sea will be generally adopted. Plainly, also, the mode of the Parsees, grounded as it is in ancient, if not original, use-to give the dead to beasts and birds—will not become universal. And, plainly, also, cremation will not be welcome to the many, free as it is from objection on the score of public health, if a method equally sanitary, and at the same time satisfactory to a reverent and tender sentiment, can be devised.

The inquiry, then, has reached its limit; for, apart from the modes that have just been named, there are no others but earth burial and entombment; and earth burial, as we have seen, cannot be made sanitary under common conditions. Therefore, if the demands of affection and sanitation are both to be met, entombment is to do it or it cannot be done.

Happily, better than any other method of disposing of the dead that has ever been devised, entombment has met the demand of affection. Never has any other mode so commended itself to men as this. There may have been at times a general adoption of cremation, and there may have been a general prevalence of earth burial, but the one has not long satisfied the sorrowing survivors, and the other has owed its beginning and continuance to the apparent absence of alternative. Wherever the living have been able, and the dead have been dearly loved or highly esteemed, the tendency to entomb and not to bury has been constantly manifested.

To call attention to this tendency is enough to prove it, so easily accessible is the evidence, and so familliar is its operation in the human heart. The most natural reference will be, first, to the Mausoleum, the tomb of Mausolus, that was erected by his sorrowing Queen, Artemisia, at Halicarnassus, upon the Egean's eastern shore; and that became at once one of the few great wonders of the ancient world. This was intended to do honor to the loved and illustrious dead: and this it did like no grave or pyre could do. This was also intended to protect the lifeless form from ruthless robbery and reckless profanation; and it performed this task so well that for near two thousand years no human eye beheld the mortal part of Mausolus and no human hand disturbed its rest. At a far earlier time, Abraham, the Father of the Faithful, while he illustrated this tendency to entomb the dead, also offered an influential example to all who would do him reverence, as in the hour of his great sorrow, he sought the seclusion and the security of Machpelah's cave for the last resting place of his beloved wife. There he buried Sarah; there he and his son and his son's son and their wives were all laid to rest, and the place of their repose hath not been violated even at this distant day. To this constant tendency constant testimony is borne by the massive and magnificent tombs in which India abounds, the tombs and pyramids that make marvelous the land of the Nile, the tombs that stood thick upon the Appian Way and that rose superb upon the Tiber's shore, the modern use to which the Pantheon is put, the Pantheon at Paris and the Crypt of the Invalides, the Abbey of Westminister, matchless in memorials, the sepulchres within the hills that

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gird Jerusalem, and the sepulchre in which the Nazarene was gently laid when his agony was ended.

It remains to consider whether entombment can be made sanitary; if it can be the problem is solved, for entombment has ever been the best that the living could do for their dead, and with the added advantage of promoting or ceasing to be prejudicial to the public health, entombment will be the choice of all whom cost or caprice does not deter.

"CAMPO SANTO," FAMILY COMPARTMENT. That entombment can be made sanitary is evident from the fact that, in countless instances, in many lands and through long periods of time, it has been made sanitary by the ingenuity of man, or by unassisted nature; and it is also evident from the fact that decomposition and disease germs are the dangers to be guarded against, and that against these both ancient and modern science have been able to guard. Not to enumerate all the modes that

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have been chanced upon, or that have been devised by men, there are two that have been notable and are available for modern use-embalming and desiccation.

It is a delusion to imagine that embalming is a lost art; that like some other marvels of the ancient time, this is a secret process that perished with the people that employed it. Did we desire it, we could embalm our princes and our priests, and retain their shrunken similitudes for distant coming times to gaze and gape upon, as skillfully as they who practiced this art in Egypt's palmiest days. Nay, it is doubtless far within the truth to claim that better than they did we could do; and we are actually apprised of better methods and results than they employed or could attain, and it is not unlikely that we shall hear of better methods still. But Egypt's method, or its modern counterpart, will hardly now be popular. It involves too much mutilation and too much transformation. When it has done its work little is left but bone and muscular tissue, and these are so transfused with foreign substances, that a form moulded from plastic matter, or sculptured from stone, could almost as truly be considered that of the lamented dead as this. Moreover, indefinite preservation of the dead is not desired. The uses to which the Egyptian Pharaohs and their humbler subjects have been put in these days of indelicacy and unscrupulousness in the pursuit of science or sordid gain, are not such as to make many eager to be preserved for a similar disposition; when the present shall have become a similar distant past.

Desiccation, in striking contrast with embalming, is the process of nature rather than of art, and involves no mutilation and no substitution of foreign substances for human flesh, and does not by unnatural means preserve the semblance of the human form so long that a susceptible sentiment is shocked and a due return of material humanity to the elements that gave it birth prevented. Desiccation is so far a natural process, that it seems not to have been thought of until nature had done the work and shown the product; and through many centuries and upon an extensive scale, nature had employed the process before it occurred to man to copy her and adopt her method for the disposition of his dead.

Wherever the air that enwrapped the lifeless form of man or beast was dry, desiccation anticipated and prevented decomposition. In deserts, upon elevated plains, upon the slopes of lofty mountain ranges, to which the winds that passed their summits bore no moisture, the dead have not decayed, but have dried undecomposed. In the morgue attached to the Hospice of St. Bernard, the dead lifted too late from their shroud of snow and borne thither to await the recognition of friends, dry and do not decay. In the "Catacombs' of the monastery of the Capuchins at Palermo, and in the "Bleikeller" at Bremen, the same phenomenon has appeared. Even Egypt is a confirmation of these statements, for it is probable, that had much less care been taken to preserve the dead, they would not there have yielded to decay as in other lands; and that moisture is so far absent from the atmosphere that the dead would have been preserved from decay by desiccation had not embalming been resorted to. Upon the elevated western plains of this