While on the subject of Prophylaxis, we must not omit allusion to the barbarous and pestiferous custom of intramural burial, which cannot be too strongly deprecated, as being not only subversive of every Christian feeling--from the daily revolting spectacle of violated sanctuaries--but otherwise demoralizing in the extreme, and poisonous to the public. “Pessimum est tempore Pestis habitare in locis mortuorum monumentis propinquis.” From the disgusting apathy evinced in this huge metropolis in the disposal of the dead, it would appear that nothing short of one of those terrible epidemic inflictions--inflictions with which in former days the Almighty was wont to visit the iniquities of his people, will bring those whose immediate province it is to a sense of the evils and perils of such abominations, which they, in spite of common sense, actuated by cupidity and fool-hardiness, still perpetuate. “Ye who amid this feverish world would wear A body free of pains, of cares the mind, Fly the rank city; shun the turbid air; Breathe not the Chaos of eternal smoke, And volatile corruption from the dead, The dying, sickening, and the living world Exhaled, to sully Heaven’s transparent dome With dim mortality.” That interment, or enclosing the dead in a grave, is a most ancient custom, there cannot be a doubt. Amongst the ancient Jews to have no burial was reckoned among the greatest of calamities. The exposure in any manner of their dead (even criminals) was looked upon as a pollution of their land. The Egyptians and Asiatics practised interment from the beginning of time. Subsequently, it became the custom to _burn_ the bodies of the dead. By Homer’s description of the funeral of Patroclus, it would appear that the Greeks used burning as early as the Trojan war. They also had recourse to interment, as is seen by their historians, who give an account of the manner in which the body was placed in the grave: Plutarch tells us that they were laid with their faces towards the east or towards the west; and Cicero informs us that, in early times, as those of Cecrops, interment was altogether made use of by the Greeks,--but we have ample testimony in history that it always took place _without_ their cities, particularly amongst the Jews and Greeks, from whom the Romans derived the practice. We have several passages in the New Testament, showing that the Jews buried their dead _without_ their city. Thus, the sepulchre in which Joseph of Arimathea laid our Saviour’s body was in the same place where he was crucified (John xix. 41), which was near the city (John xix. 20). And we are taught in St. Matthew (xxviii. 52–53), that, at our Lord’s passion, the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept, arose and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and _went into the Holy City_, and appeared unto many.