Reicke, in the course of his dissertation on the physical dangers from exposure to emanations from the remains, mentions an instance where a little child having struck the body of the parent which had died of a malignant disease, the hand and arm of the child was dangerously inflamed with malignant pustules in consequence. The mental effects on the elder children or members of the family of the retention of the body in the living room, day after day, and during meal times, until familiarity is induced,—retained, as the body commonly is, during all this time in the _sordes_ of disease, the progress of change and decomposition disfiguring the remains and adding disgust to familiarity,—are attested to be of the most demoralizing character. Such deaths occur sooner or later in various forms in every poor family; and in neighbourhoods where there are no sanitary regulations, where they are ravaged by epidemics, such scenes are doubly familiar to the whole population. § 41. Astonishment is frequently excited by the cases which abound in our penal records indicative of the prevalence of habits of savage brutality and carelessness of life amongst the labouring population; but crimes, like sores, will commonly be found to be the result of wider influences than are externally manifest; and the reasons for such astonishment, will be diminished in proportion as those circumstances are examined, which influence the minds and habits of the population more powerfully than precepts or book education. Among these demoralizing circumstances, which appear to be preventible or removable, are those which the present inquiry brings to light. Disrespect for the human form under suffering, indifference or carelessness at death,—or at that destruction which follows as an effect of suffering—is rarely found amongst the uneducated, unconnected with a callousness to others’ pain, and a recklessness about life itself. A known effect on uneducated survivors of the frequency of death amongst youth or persons in the vigour of life, is to create a reckless avidity for immediate enjoyment. Some examples of the demoralization attendant on such circumstances cannot but be apparent in the evidence arising in the course of this inquiry into other practices connected with interments. § 42. On submitting the above to a friend, a clergyman, whose benevolence has carried him to alleviate the sufferings in several hundred death-bed scenes in the abodes of the labouring classes, and who has been present, perhaps, at every death in his own flock, in a wretchedly crowded parish, he writes in the following terms his confirmation:—