All over Scotland, and more especially in the lowlands, memorials remain of the time when graves were opened and coffins were rifled of their dead, to supply the needs of the dissecting rooms of the medical schools. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Shenstone, in protesting against this sacrilege, contended that the bodies of convicted malefactors should suffice for the needs of the medical profession-- If Paean’s sons these horrid rites require, If Health’s fair science be by these refined, Let guilty convicts, for their use, expire; And let their breathless corse avail mankind. But though the bodies of executed murderers had for two centuries been handed over to surgeons for dissection, the supply of evil-doers must have been still too scanty, even at a time when theft and robbery were capitally punished. The growing success of the medical schools in Scotland increased the demand for human bodies to such a degree as to offer strong temptation to the enterprise of bold and reckless men. So frequent did violations of the tomb become as to lead to extraordinary precautions to prevent them. The graves were protected with heavy iron gratings securely riveted above them, many of which may still be seen in the churchyards of Fife and the Lothians. Watch-houses were likewise erected in the burial-grounds to serve as shelters for the men who in turn every night took their stations there, with guns loaded, on the outlook for any midnight marauders. In a commanding position in the graveyard around the parish church of Crail, one of these houses may still be seen, bearing the suggestive record-- ERECTED for securing the DEAD Ann. Dom. MDCCCXXVI. The trade of the ‘resurrection-men’ was finally destroyed by an Act of Parliament passed in the year 1832, in consequence of the murders committed by Burke and Hare in Edinburgh, and Bishop and Williams in London. This measure, by permitting the unclaimed bodies of paupers, dying in poor-houses, to be taken for dissection to the medical schools, provided a supply of subjects which, if not abundant, at least prevented any further violations of the grave. [Sidenote: TOMBSTONE INSCRIPTIONS] Of the monumental inscriptions in Scottish graveyards various collections have been published, and to these many more might be added. They have seldom any literary excellence, and their chief interest arises from their oddities of spelling and grammar, and their conceptions of a future state. As an illustrative example of them, I may cite one from the kirkyard of Sweetheart Abbey, in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright.