In “The London Burial-Grounds,” by Mrs. Basil Holmes, 1896, p. 269, the question is asked:--“Are we ever to allow England to be divided like a chess-board into towns and burial-places? What we have to consider is how to dispose of the dead without taking so much valuable space from the living. In the metropolitan area alone we have almost filled (and in some places over-filled) twenty-four new cemeteries within sixty years, with an area of above six hundred acres; and this is as nothing compared with the huge extent of land used for interments just outside the limits of the metropolis. If the cemeteries are not to extend indefinitely they must in time be built upon, or they must be used for burial over and over again, or the ground must revert to its original state as agricultural land, or we must turn our parks and commons into cemeteries, and let our cemeteries be our only recreation grounds, which heaven forbid!” According to Dr. Ebenezer Duncan eight thousand bodies are buried yearly in Glasgow and its neighbourhood, poisoning both air and water, and endangering the public health. The same state of things has existed in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and other large towns. The following resolution was unanimously adopted in the Preventive Medicine Department of a Health Congress, Glasgow, in July, 1896:-- “That in the opinion of this Congress cremation of the dead, especially in cases of infectious disease, is a natural and very desirable hygienic process, and that this Congress of the British Institute of Public Health use all proper means to urge upon the Government the desirability of their promoting a measure to enable sanitary authorities, if they so desire, to build crematoria and to conduct them under proper superintendence.” It must be allowed, however, that cremation, in spite of its obvious advantages, is not one of those movements which advance by leaps and bounds. The recent annual report of the Cremation Society of England states that during the last year there were two hundred and eight cremations in the United Kingdom--viz., one hundred and fifty at Woking, and fifty-eight at Manchester. Crematoria have recently been established at Glasgow and Liverpool. CHAPTER XXI. WAITING MORTUARIES.