[93] Professor P. Gorini, author of 'I vulcani sperimentali,' is said to have made some experiments in his laboratory at Lodi during the month of September 1873, with a liquid composition of which he preserves the secret, and which envelopes in flames and completely destroys without noise or odour whatever animal substance is immersed in it. But some doubts have been raised as to its practicability. [94] 'Jewish Chronicle.' [95] See p. 64. CHAPTER III. OUR BURIAL LAWS. In order to properly estimate the improved condition of things during the present day, and under the present regulations as to burial, it will be necessary to examine the state in which our graveyards were found before these new regulations were in force. Let us take, then, our metropolitan burying-places as they existed a little more than twenty years ago. A very good idea of the lamentable want of proper space for burial in the metropolis in 1843 was furnished by Mr. Sopwith, who showed by a plan that the extent of intramural space then provided was just about half of what it ought to be, even at the standard of 110 burials per acre. At that time things were in a most desperate state, the burials at the parochial yards of St. Mary's-at-Hill, St. George's Burial Ground in Uxbridge Road, and St. Olave's, Tooley Street, averaging 1,204 per acre. The grounds belonging to other religionists were in some cases worse; for the interments in the Roman Catholic yards at Moorfields and Dockhead, in the Baptist ground at Woolwich and in the Congregationalist fields at Stepney, averaged 1,278 per acre. But the parochial burial-grounds of St. Giles's, St. Pancras, and St. John's Chapel of Ease, exceeded the last-named figure by 282, and, horrible to relate in these days--when we calculate that, to properly accommodate even 52,000 annual metropolitan dead with decennially renewed interments, we should want at least 500 acres--the burials in the new Bunhill General Burial Ground reached the astounding figure of 2,323 per acre. This was a fearful state of things, it must be admitted, but it was even exceeded in point of hideousness by many of the yards of our country towns, and even of our villages, where one might have supposed no necessity for overcrowding existed. The reader who is anxious to examine these revolting details for himself can see them in the reports of the evidence taken before the Parliamentary Commissions of 1842, of 1843, and of 1850. These reports were issued by Lords Carlisle and Ashley, and by Mr. Edwin Chadwick and Dr. Southwood Smith, and revealed horrors beyond all that could have been imagined. Nor were some of the villages of Switzerland better situated with regard to accommodation than our own. Read for instance the condition of the churchyard of Schuls, as described by Professor Reclam.[96] [96] In the 'Gartenlaube,' No. 19, 1874.