One consequence of abandoning the rite of burial, as a trade and source of emolument to persons without instruction or qualification, who employ for important ministrations agents of the lowest class, § 51, is, that only the superficial, ceremonial, and profitable portions of the service are usually attended to, and that important private and public securities are lost. One of the proper ministrations after death, a purification or ablution of the body, is generally omitted. On inquiring, as to the effects produced amongst the lower class of Irish by the retention of the body amidst the survivors under circumstances of imminent danger, a comparative immunity has been ascribed to the practice which they maintain of washing the corpse immediately after death. Amongst the lower class of the English and Scotch population of the towns, this important sanitary rite is extensively neglected, and the corpse is generally kept (except the face) with the _sordes_ of disease upon it. The occurrence of such cases as have already been mentioned, § 31 and § 40, of the propagation by contact of diseases of a malignant character, may probably be sometimes ascribed to this neglect. The ablution, whether with tepid or cold water, as a general practice, is a protection against cases of protracted syncope or suspended animation. Besides these cases, there are others of a judicial nature which cannot be termed extraordinary amidst a population where deaths from accidents or one description of violence or other, a large proportion of them involving criminality, amount in England and Wales alone to between 11,000 and 12,000 per annum. Cases have occurred of violent deaths discovered on exhumation, and on judicial examination where marks of violence have been covered by the shroud, and where the coffin has been closed on _primâ facie_ evidence of murder. Between the every-day dangers arising from the undue retention of the dead amidst the living, and all real dangers and painful apprehensions, a course of proceeding has been taken at Franckfort, and several cities in Germany, which has hitherto been perfectly successful as a sanitary measure, and highly satisfactory to the population. § 95. A case is stated to have occurred at Franckfort, where, on taking to the grave a child which had died immediately after its mother, who had been just interred, on opening her coffin the eye of the supposed corpse moved, and she was taken out and recovered. She stated that she retained sensation, but had utterly lost all power of volition, even when the coffin was closed, and she heard the earth fall upon it.