First,--as regards the _minimum accommodation_ to be given in your Cemetery; I assume that every person buried there, however humble his previous station in life, may in death claim a grave to himself. It has been the opprobrium of our previous system that, in the poorer classes of interments, many bodies have been huddled together into a single pit. Probably you will think, as regards your future burial-place, that no consideration of cheapness can justify this indecency: probably you will be unwilling that, in a presence which confounds all social comparisons, there should be drawn, with your sanction, between rich and poor any so disrespectful distinction. But at all events, on sanitary grounds, I feel bound to assure you that these multiple burials are quite inadmissible. With such concentration of organic remains in very narrow compass, the soil grows utterly fœtid; and it becomes impossible to guard against nuisance arising to the public, or against danger to those who are occupied in digging and tending the ground. These evils, indeed, are so glaring, and the indecorum of crowded interment has long been so notorious, that nothing could have given them continuance except the necessities of our narrow accommodation under the system of intramural burial: and it would of course be without excuse to perpetuate them under the changed circumstances of extramural Cemeteries, where space can so readily be obtained for all legitimate requirements of the public. So far as the experience of other countries may help to determine your judgment in this matter, I may inform you that, in every foreign interment system which can deserve to be considered an establishment of public authority, the right of single burial is universally recognised. Next--as regards the _succession of interments_; according to the burial-usages of modern times, no public Cemetery with fixed limits can be permanently useful, except on a full recognition of the fact that it is a decaying place for the dead, not a place for their embalmment or mummification. For hence it follows, that ground once used for burial becomes equally fitted for a second use, whenever by gradual decomposition the bodies first interred there have thoroughly vanished from the soil. This principle has given the common rule of burial; and for obvious reasons. Under any other plan, the entire area allotted for interment would presently be in holding. No portion, however remote the date of its first occupation, could be resumed for a second series of interments; and the provision of a new Cemetery would be indispensable. Pushed to its extreme consequences, such a system must eventually convert the entire country into its burial-ground.