Dr. Moore Russell Fletcher, in his “Suspended Animation and Restoration,” Boston, 1890, p. 19, speaking of the treatment of the dead in the United States, says:--“It is doubtful whether modern civilisation has much advanced the rites of burial, or the means of preventing interment before positive death. The practice now is, as soon as apparent death takes place, to begin at once preparing the body for burial; the relatives and physician desert the room, pack it in ice or open the windows, thus banishing any possible chance of reviving or resuscitating any spark of vitality which may exist. No examination is ever made by the physician or the friends to see if there are even the faintest signs of life present. Under such circumstances, and with no attempts made at discovering whether any signs of life were still present (but a hasty burial instead), it is not strange that cases of premature interment frequently occur.” The Rev. Walter Whiter, in his “Dissertation on the Disorder of Death,” 1819, p. 328, sensibly observes:--“The signs marked on the dying and the dead are fallacious. The dying man may be the sinking man, exhausted by his malady, or perhaps exhausting his malady, and fainting under the conflict. Exert all the arts which you possess, and which have been found not only able to resuscitate and restore the dying, but even the dead; rouse him from this perilous condition, and suffer him not, by your supineness and neglect, to pass into a state of putrefactive death.” And in p. 363:--“If the humane societies had applied the same methods in various cases of natural death which they have adopted in the case of drowning, and if they had obtained a similar success in the cultivation of their art, the gloom of the bed of death would be brightened with cheering prospects, and would have become the bed of restoration and the scene of hope.” [AN OPENING FOR THE PROFESSION.]