GENTLEMEN, In order to an application of the Metropolitan Burials Act by the constituted authorities of the City, you have requested me to report how far, in my judgment, the existing burial-places within this jurisdiction are fit for further reception of the dead. I have little to add to the information which I have laid before the Commission in my successive annual reports--especially in that of 1849, and which long since induced me to express my conviction ‘that the City of London could no longer with safety or propriety be allowed to furnish intramural burial to its dead.’ It would, indeed, be ridiculous if I should pretend to you that this part of the subject requires any further inquiry. Putrefactive decomposition of one kind and another is the principal cause of town-unhealthiness. Against its occurrence round about our houses all your legislation is directed. The human body, once destitute of life, furnishes no exception to the laws of organic decay: under the common laws of chemical change, it soon dissolves itself into products neither less offensive, nor less poisonous, than those of any brute’s decomposition. And you cannot take a juster view of the subject--you cannot arrive at stronger arguments for the immediate abolition of intramural interment, than by forcing yourselves to discard for a moment all memory of the fading human outline which masks this dreadful nuisance, and to conceive it as _a mere bulk of animal matter_, planted every year to undergo decomposition within the City, beneath our Churches, and before our thresholds.[91] [91] The right of interment in the City may at present be claimed in respect probably of more than three thousand corpses _per_ annum. The number actually interred of late years has, I believe, not exceeded an average of two thousand _per_ annum. Dead bodies thus buried contribute importantly in their neighbourhood to the vitiation of air and water. Those that lie shelved in vaults, eventually, if not at first, spread through the atmosphere every product of their decomposition. Those that are dug into the soil have their decay modified by its influence, mingle with its drainage the products of their transformation, and thus (as I have shown in my remarks on the Bishopsgate pump water) find their issue in the nearest land-spring of the spot, polluting the drink of the population. Further, in all the more frequented burial-grounds, the soil seems to be saturated with animal matters only partially transformed; and at every new disturbance by the spade, a fresh quantity of this unctuous clay comes upmost, tainting the air with materials of fœtid decomposition, often to the great distress of persons who dwell in the vicinity.