The occurrence of cases of instant death to grave-diggers, from accidentally inhaling the concentrated miasma which escapes from coffins, is undeniable. Slower deaths from exposure to such miasma are designated as “low fevers,” and whether or not the constitutional disturbances attendant on the exposure to the influence of such miasma be or not the true typhus, it suffices as a case requiring a remedy, that the exposure to that influence is apt to produce grievous and fatal injuries amongst the public. § 9. Undertakers state that they sometimes experience, in particularly crowded grave-yards, a sensation of faintness and nausea without perceiving any offensive smell. Dr. Riecke appears to conclude, from various instances which are given, that emanations from putrid remains operate in two ways,—one set of effects being produced through the lungs by impurity of the air from the mixture of irrespirable gases; the other set, through the olfactory nerves by powerful, penetrating, and offensive smells. On the whole, the evidence tends to establish the general conclusion that offensive smells are true warnings of sanitary evils to the population. The fact of the general offensiveness of such emanations is adduced by Dr. Riecke also as evidence of their injurious quality. Another circumstance which must awaken in us distrust of putrid emanations, is the powerful impression they make on the sense of smell. It certainly cannot be far from the truth to call the organ of smell the truest sentinel of the human frame. “Many animals,” observes Rudolphi, “are entirely dependent on their sense of smell for finding out food that is not injurious; where their smell is injured they are easily deceived, and have often fallen a sacrifice to the consequent mistakes.” Amongst all known smells, there is, perhaps, no one which is so universally, and to such a degree revolting to man, as the smell of animal decomposition. The roughest savage, as well as the most civilized European, fly with equal disgust from a place where the air is infected by it. If an instinct ever can be traced in man, certainly it is in the present case: and is instinct a superfluous monitor exactly in this one case? Can instinct mislead just in this one circumstance? Can it ever be, that the air which fills us with the greatest disgust, is the finest elixir of life, as Dumoulins had the boldness to maintain in one of his official reports. Hippolyte Cloquet, in his Osphrestologie has attempted to throw some light on the effect of smell on the human frame, and though we must entirely disregard many of the anecdotes which he has blended into his inquiry, yet the result remains firmly proved that odours in general exert a very powerful influence on the health of men, and that all very acutely impressing smells are highly to be suspected of possessing injurious properties.