A writer in the _British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review_, 1855, vol. xv., p. 75, says:--“The earliest movements in the direction of means for the prevention of premature interments originated with Winslow in France, followed by other well-known writers upon the signs of death. It was Madame Necker, however, who embodied their suggestions in a practicable form as submitted to the National Assembly, in 1792, by Count Berchshold. In the ninth year of the first French Republic (1801) a project was entertained for the erection of six ‘temples funeraires’ in Paris, but came to no good, as attendant evils preponderated. To Germany belongs the credit of having executed these designs in such wise that they should not prove the positive sources of more danger to the living than could be counter-balanced by the occasional preservation of an individual from the risk of premature interment. Believing that this risk had been prodigiously diminished since the establishment of these institutions for the reception of cases where doubt of the reality of death has existed, Hufeland, in Weimar, devised the plan that Frankfort-on-the-Maine incorporated with its reform in sepulture and establishment of extra-mural cemeteries, in 1823. Hufeland’s plans have subsequently been adopted and carried out in many other German States.... As a sanitary measure the separation of the dead from the living, especially from among the crowded poor, would be, apart from the not less important point of verification of death, an incalculable benefit.... It behoves us in this matter to learn another lesson from our neighbours, and to take measures to prevent the occurrence of catastrophes too fearfully horrible to contemplate in thought, too dreadful for the most vivid imagination to realise. Science can hold out no token by which to recognise the certainty of death. Sanitary police, at least in England, is indifferent about the risk of a few burials alive, and thinks it superfluous to prevent their occurrence.” [THE GERMAN SYSTEM.]