As soon as the life of man is extinct, his body becomes the seat of chemical decomposition or putrefaction, and effluvia are exhaled from the putrid corpse, varying in some degree, in amount, rapidity, and activity, according as the circumstances in which it is placed are more or less favourable to putrefaction. The effluvia which are exhaled are deleterious, and an atmosphere in which they are evolved, if close, small, and confined, often becomes so contaminated and vitiated as to be calculated to produce death by suffocation and disease. The body of man after death is thus a centre of putrefaction, and the source of agencies prejudicial to the living, and on that account alone, it is wise so to dispose of the dead that they may not prove hurtful to the surviving, which has been done with more or less efficiency from the very earliest epochs of time, by various forms of burial. But solicitude for the safety of the living has not been the only motive for the burial of the dead, for the destiny of man after death is clearly pointed out, and his doom to the earth is amply shewn by various expressions contained in the Holy Writings, and his burial or interment has been performed in obedience to the original or divine plan. The interment or burial of the dead has likewise been considered as a rite due to the memory of the deceased, and a mark of respect which the friends and relatives were bound by every sacred obligation, to perform with all becoming solemnity. To neglect the sacred office of interment, or any of the solemnities usually in practice, was, even among the earliest Greeks and Romans, to treat the memory of the departed with the grossest disrespect and indignity. The denial of burial, with all its formalities, was esteemed by the Greeks as a mark of infamy due only to villains, traitors to their country, and those who died in debt, and the bodies of such characters were accordingly decreed unfit for ordinary interment. The Jews interred the bodies of the dead for the most part contiguous to the high ways, in gardens, and on hills. The Greeks and Romans interred their dead in the ground which surrounded their sacred buildings, and at the gates and porticoes of their temples. The Saxons, Danes, and other Scandinavian nations, enclosed the bodies of the deceased in stone coffins, which were placed or built at the distance of two or three feet from the surface of the earth.