Commenting upon actual cases of premature burial, the _Lancet_, March 17, 1866, p. 295, says:--“Truly there is something about the very notion of such a fate calculated to make one shudder, and to send a cold stream down one’s spine. By such a catastrophe is not meant the sudden avalanche of earth, bricks, or stones upon the luckless miner or excavator, or the crushing, suffocative death from tumbling ruins. No; it is the cool, determined treatment of a living being as if he were dead--the rolling him in his winding sheet, the screwing him down in his coffin, the weeping at his funeral, and the final lowering of him into the narrow grave, and piling upon his dark and box-like dungeon loads of his mother earth. The last footfall departs from the solitary church-yard, leaving the entranced sleeper behind in his hideous shell soon to awaken to consciousness and to a benumbed half-suffocated existence for a few minutes; or else, more horrible still, there he lies beneath the ground conscious of what has been and still is, until, by some fearful agonised struggle of the inner man at the weird phantasmagoria which has passed across his mental vision, he awakes to a bodily vivification as desperate in its torment for a brief period as has been that of his physical activity. But it is soon past. There is scarcely room to turn over in the wooden chamber; and what can avail a few shrieks and struggles of a half-stifled, cramped-up man!” To prevent such unspeakable horrors as are here pictured, the Egyptians kept the bodies of the dead under careful supervision by the priests until satisfied that life was extinct, previous to embalming them by means of antiseptics, balsams, and odoriferous gums. The Greeks were aware of the dangers of premature burial, and cut off fingers before cremation to see whether life was extinct. In ancient Rome the recurrence of cases of premature burial had impressed the nation with the necessity for exercising the greatest caution in the treatment of the supposed dead; hasty conclusions were looked upon as criminal, the absence of breath or heat or a cadaverous appearance were regarded as uncertain tests, and the supposed dead were put into warm baths or washed with hot water, and other means of restoration adopted. Neither in the greater part of Europe nor in the United States are any such means resorted to now, except in the case of apparent death by drowning, by asphyxia, or by hanging. Premature burials and narrow escapes are of almost every-day occurrence, as the narratives in the newspapers testify; and the complaint made by a surgeon, Mr. Cooper, a hundred and fifty years ago, that the evil is perpetuated because we are slaves to prejudice, and because those vested with authority refuse to take measures for prevention, remains a serious blot upon our advanced civilisation. The _Spectator_, September 14, 1895, commenting upon this unsatisfactory state of affairs, observes:--“Burning,