While it is not suggested that the foregoing are cases of premature burial, yet it is absolutely certain that they belong to the category of persons of whom a considerable percentage are liable to such misadventures unless precautions very different from those in vogue are taken to prevent them. All medical practitioners allow that a man may be half drowned or half dead, and that cases of suspended animation occur where the most experienced physician is unable to detect the faintest indication of breathing or cardiac movement. They are, however, quite sceptical as to absolute suspensions of life where all the ordinary methods to test its existence fail; and, owing to this scepticism, and the readiness to give certificates of death in cases of alleged sudden death, have unwittingly promoted premature burials, as will appear by the facts quoted in these pages. [HASTY BURIAL CONDEMNED.] Mr. M. Cooper, in the “Uncertainty of the Signs of Death,” p. 49, cites from a letter by one William Fabri, a surgeon, the opinion that we “... have just reason to condemn the too precipitate interment of persons overpowered by lethargies, apoplexies, or suffocation of the matrix; for I know there have been some, supposed to be irretrievably cut off by these disorders, who, resuming strength and returning to life, have raised the boards of their own coffins, because in such disorders the soul only retires, as it were, to her most secret and concealed residence, in order to make the body afterwards sensible that she had not entirely forsaken it.” These wise counsels were written two hundred and sixty-eight years ago, since which time thousands of our fellow-creatures have, it is feared, been the victims of premature interment, and yet the danger then pointed out remains. The _Undertakers’ and Funeral Directors’ Journal_, the conductors of which are laudably anxious to keep their profession from the odium of burying people alive, referring to sudden deaths and this danger, says, in its issue of January 24, 1894, under the head of “A Burning Question”:--“Sufferers from such chronic ailments as are reputed to end suddenly are in constant danger from the present state of the law, if they are in the hands of people interested in their death.” And continues: “Even where a medical certificate is obtained, such general laxity has entered into proceedings that but little protection is thereby afforded to the public. While the medical man is bound to state what he believes to be the cause of death, he is under no obligation to make sure either that the patient is dead at all, or that, if dead, he died from a particular disease for which he was attending him.” VIVISECTION. The _Medical Times and Gazette_, 1859, vol. xviii., p. 256, has the following:-- “A CRIMINAL’S HEART.