Mr. Wells had long been a member of the Council of the College of Surgeons when in 1882-3 he became its President. In 1882 he was created a baronet. He has by no means limited himself to questions of operative surgery. His public efforts have been frequently directed towards important subjects of state and municipal polity, sanitary matters, the abatement of the smoke nuisance, the securing of the health of passengers on board ship, the hygienic condition of hospitals, and perhaps most important of all, the mode of disposal of the dead. His views on the evils of the present system are well set forth in a letter he addressed to the _Times_ on March 3, 1885, from which we make the following extract:— “In this metropolitan district in the twenty-five years 1859-1883, the deaths registered number 1,896,314. Of course, the dead have been buried, and with scarcely an exception, in and around London. Grant that in ten years a body may become harmless—although I do not at all believe that it does so within twenty years in our soil and climate—can any imagination conceive the enormous mass of decaying animal matter by which we are surrounded? Could any one be surprised at the outbreak of some devastating pestilence a hundredfold more destructive than the plague or black death of the Middle Ages? And ought not every sanitary reformer to aid the revival of the ancient practice which would convert the existing cemeteries, so rapidly becoming sources of danger to the public health, into permanently beautiful gardens, receptacles for vases and cinerary urns, which would encourage sculpture, mural decoration, and coloured glass-work; while in our country churches the ashes of the people might again repose in death near the scene of their work in life perfectly harmless, instead of polluting the earth of the church-yard and the water drunk by the surviving people, or being carried far from their homes and places of worship to some distant cemetery, which before long must become overcrowded and pestilential. Public sentiment may for a time revolt at an innovation, but a very little reflection will bring most people to agree with part of the Bishop of Manchester’s address on consecrating a new cemetery. He said:— “‘Here is another hundred acres of land withdrawn from the food-producing area of the country for ever.... In the same sense in which the “Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath,” I hold that the earth was made, not for the dead, but for the living. No intelligent faith can suppose that any Christian doctrine is affected by the manner in which, or the time in which, this mortal body of ours crumbles into dust.’”