the horrid sight of the corpse when the coffin was opened. The whole was a mass of entire putrefaction; and it was now clearly demonstrated that the numerous insects, both large and small, together with the effluvia which had issued from the body, had caused the pestilential infection, which was a week before attributed to poison. On this discovery, those who had been accused of poisoning the wine, &c., were liberated, and atonement made by the clergyman and magistrate for their unfounded charge.” It was said by St. Cyril, when offering an excuse for the mode of burial of the Gentiles, “that their temples were only beautiful monuments of dead men.” How differently would he have expressed himself with regard to our Christian metropolitan churches or temples of this, the nineteenth century, which are loathsome receptacles of corruption! But a few years ago, in the autumn of 1843, the poisonous effects of disturbing a graveyard were but too fatally evident. The church and churchyard of Minchinhampton are very old,--the latter having served for a burying-ground for the previous five hundred years; it was consequently densely crowded with dead bodies. In rebuilding the church, it became necessary, or was thought expedient, to lower the surface of the graveyard to within a foot or two of the remains of those buried. Many bodies were disturbed during this process, and re-interred. The earth so removed of a dark colour--saturated, in fact, with the product of human putrefaction--was, in a fatal hour, devoted to the purposes of agriculture! About one thousand cart-loads were thus employed--some on a new piece of burial-ground, to make the grass grow quickly, some as manure on the neighbouring fields, some in the rector’s garden! and some in that of the patron. The seeds of disease were thus widely sown, and the result was such as any person of common sense might have expected. The diffusion of a morbid poison which soon followed, was evinced by an outbreak of fever in this previously healthy locality. The family of the rector, and the inhabitants of the streets adjoining the churchyard, were the first attacked, and were also the greatest sufferers. The rector lost his wife, his daughter, and his gardener. The patron’s gardener, who had been employed in the unseemly act of dressing flower-beds with human manure, also died. In short, wherever the earth had been taken, disease followed. The children who attended the school took fever as they passed the upturned surface of the graveyard, went home, and died; but they did not communicate the disease to those who came near them, nor did it occur in any person who had not been exposed to the cause of its development. Seventeen deaths occurred, and upwards of two hundred children were attacked with measles, scarlet fever, and peculiar eruptions.