“Exposure to cold may also induce a suspension of vitality liable to be mistaken for actual death. This year the French Senate has again received several petitions relative to premature interments.... And, considering the length of time that trances, catalepsies, lethargies, and cases of suspended animation have been known occasionally to continue, it is scarcely, in England, less interesting to us, though public feeling, which is only an expression of natural affection, approves, and indeed almost compels, a longer delay. The attention of the French Government being once more directed to the subject, there is little doubt that all reasonable grounds for fear will be removed.[20] “The petitioners have requested, as a precaution, that all burials for the future should, in the first instance, be only provisional. Before filling a grave, a communication is to be made between the coffin and the upper atmosphere by means of a respiratory tube; and the grave is not to be finally closed until all hope of life is abandoned. These precautions, it will be seen at once, however good in theory, are scarcely practicable. Others have demanded the general establishment of mortuary chambers, or dead-houses, like those in Germany. And not only the petitioners, but several senators, seem to consider that measure the full solution of the problem. Article 77 of the Civil Code prescribes a delay of twenty-four hours only, which appears to them to be insufficient, since, they urge, it admits the certainty that death has taken place only after putrefactive decomposition has set in. Now, a much longer time than twenty-four hours may elapse before that decomposition manifests itself. Deposit, therefore, your dead in a mortuary chapel, until you are perfectly sure, from the evidence of your senses, that life is utterly and hopelessly extinct. [DIFFICULTY OF DIAGNOSIS.] “When Article 77 of the Civil Code was under discussion by the Council of State, Fourcroy added: ‘It shall be specified that the civil officer be assisted by an officier de santé (a medical man of inferior rank to a doctor of medicine); because there are cases in which it is difficult to make certain that death has actually occurred, without a thorough knowledge of its symptoms, and because there are tolerably numerous examples to prove that people _have_ been buried alive.’ “In Paris, especially since Baron Hausmann’s administration, Article 77 has been strictly fulfilled; but the same exactitude cannot be expected in out-of-the-way nooks and corners of the country, where a doctor cannot always be found at a minute’s warning, to declare whether death be real or apparent only. It is clear that the Legislature has hit upon the sole indisputable practical solution; the difficulty lies in its rigorous and efficient application.