8. You are invested with important authority against _such trades and occupations as are offensive or injurious_ to their neighbourhood. Under your former Act, you can subject to penalties any person who shall ‘roast or burn, boil, distil, or otherwise decompose any root, drug, or other article or thing, in any house or building, and thereby cause offensive or injurious smells or vapours to be emitted therefrom, so as to become a common nuisance;’ and the same Act also gave you a very inoperative clause against such nuisance-causing manufactories as might begin to work in the City after the commencement of that Act. Your new law enacts that everything practicable shall be done for the suppression of all nuisances arising in manufactures and the like:--that, after the first of January next, every furnace used in the City shall be such as to consume its own smoke; and that whatever trade or business may occasion noxious or offensive effluvia, or otherwise annoy the inhabitants of its neighbourhood, shall be required to employ, to your satisfaction, the best known means for preventing or counteracting such annoyance. * * * * * 9. You have certain powers, to which I adverted in my former Report, as likely to come into activity whenever the injurious practice of intramural burial might cease; powers, namely, relating to the _disposal of dead bodies_ in certain specified cases: and under your new Act, you have acquired some further authority (likewise only to be exercised after that cessation, and with the consent of the Bishop of London) to _appropriate the disused burial-grounds_ for purposes of improvement. At the time of my last Report I looked ‘forward to the complete discontinuance of burial within your territory as a matter for warm congratulation among all who are interested in the cause of sanitary improvement;’ and it is with proportionate disappointment and regret, that I have now to report to you that the Order in Council, which was to have closed all metropolitan burial grounds, has never yet been issued; and that negociations, conducted by the General Board of Health for the purchase of a sufficient extramural cemetery, were suddenly arrested at the close of the last session of Parliament. Your powers in relation to these matters remain of course meanwhile inoperative.[68] [68] In the Parliamentary Session of 1852, the Interments Act of 1850, which had remained inoperative, was repealed under a new ‘Act to amend the Laws concerning the Burial of the Dead in the Metropolis,’ which became law July 1st, 1852. Under this Act, the powers, alluded to in a later part of this volume, were given to the Commissioners of Sewers of the City of London as a Burial Board for the City.--J. S., 1854. * * * * *