Terilli, a celebrated physician of Venice, in a treatise of the “Causes of Sudden Death,” sect. vi., cap. 2, says:--“Since the body is sometimes so deprived of every vital function, and the principle of life reduced so low, that it cannot be distinguished from death, the laws both of natural comparison and revealed religion oblige us to wait a sufficient time for life manifesting itself by the usual signs, peradventure it should not be, as yet, totally extinguished; and if we should act a contrary part, we may possibly become murderers, by confining to the gloomy regions of the dead those who are actually alive.” Mr. Cooper, surgeon, in his treatise on “The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death,” pp. 70, 71, had in his possession the following certificate, written and signed by Mr. Blau, a native of Auvergne, a man of untainted veracity:--“I hereto subscribe, and declare, that fifty-five years ago, happening to reside at Toulouse for the sake of my studies, and going to St. Stephen’s Church to hear a sermon, I saw a corpse brought thither for the sake of interment. The ceremony, however, was delayed till the sermon should be over; but the supposed dead person, being laid in a chapel and attended by all the mourners, about the middle of the sermon discovered manifest signs of life, for which reason he was quickly conveyed back to his own house. From a consideration of circumstances, it is sufficiently obvious that, without the intervention of the sermon, the man had been interred alive.” Between 1780 and 1800 many pamphlets on the subject appeared in Germany and France. Opposite sides were taken, some advocating delay until putrefaction, others urging immediate burial. In 1788, Marcus Hertz wrote strongly against the prevailing precipitate burials among the Jews. He asked “what motive could justify hasty burials;” and continued:--“The writings of learned men and doctors, of both early times and recent date, describe the dangers of precipitate burial; there is not a town in the world that has not its stories of revivals in the grave.” In 1791, Rev. J. W. C. Wolff, in Germany, published numerous narratives of narrow escapes from the grave. In 1792, Rev. Johann Moritz Schwager stated that he had preached for twenty years against precipitate burials, and that he had been requested to do so by a number of corporate bodies who had evidence of the danger of hasty interments. About 1800 great excitement prevailed in Germany on account of some narrow escapes from living burial that happened in high quarters, many books and pamphlets having been issued, and sermons preached by the clergy on the subject. The key-note of all of these was the fallaciousness of the appearances of death, and that none was reliable but decomposition.