the patient or examined the body. Nor, in spite of the appointment of death-verificators by our neighbours across the Channel, is this important precaution effectively carried out by them. M. Devergie reports that in twenty-five thousand communes in France no verification of death takes place, although the law requires it; and he demands that no diploma shall be given without the candidate having proved himself conversant with the signs of death. (_Medical Times_, London, 1874, vol. i., p. 25.) On personal inquiry from medical authorities in France, during the present year (1896), we learn that this laxity still prevails. It appears strange that, except when a man dies, all his concerns are protected by custom and formalities, or guarded by laws, so as to insure his interests being fairly carried out to completion. Thus we see that heirship, marriage, business affairs of all kinds, whether of a public or private nature, are amply guarded by such precautionary and authoritative measures as will secure them. But one of the most important of all human interests--that which relates to the termination of life--is managed in such a careless and perfunctory way as to permit of irreparable mistakes. To be sure there are laws in most of the Continental States of Europe that are intended to regulate the care and burial of the dead, but few of them make it certain that the apparently dead shall not be mistaken for the really dead, and treated as such. None of them allow more than seventy-two hours before burial (some allow only thirty-six, others twenty-four, and others again much less, according to the nature of the disease), unless the attending physician petitions the authorities for reasonable delay--a rare occurrence. And even if postponement is granted, it is doubtful if the inevitable administrative formalities would leave opportunities for dubious cases to receive timely and necessary attention, or for cases of trance, catalepsy, coma, or the like, to be rescued from a living burial.