The coroner should issue the burial permits, the health officer being notified only when persons have died of an infectious or contagious disease. To make this scheme successful, it is essential that the practitioner of medicine who assumes the coronership should receive adequate payment for his services, such remuneration in fact as would enable him to give up his whole time and talent to his office. Beside the advantages which I have already indicated, a system such as this would doubtlessly enrich the mortality statistics as well as forensic medicine and pathological anatomy. That it would be an efficient safeguard against crime, I think every unprejudiced person will admit. If this were not so, I could but indorse the Rev. H. R. Haweis, who declares honestly: “For so grand a benefit to mankind, a few more cases of poisoning would be a small price to pay. In the great progress of social and sanitary reform I cannot conceive what it signifies whether or not an additional Smith or Jones gets poisoned here and there.” Dr. Purdy says: “Indeed, we have not in man’s history any great benefit resulting from a system or practice but it is attended by its consequent minor evils; no great public good but has its attendant drawbacks.” For these reasons the following saying of the celebrated Professor Coletti, of the University of Padua, Italy, will always be recognized as a truth of unusual stability: “The health of whole communities is of far greater importance than the possible escape of a few criminals.” The enemies of cremation inquire: Would not incineration deprive the schools of medicine of anatomical material, the phrenologists, craniologists, and last, but not least, the anthropologists, of the basis of their investigations; namely, the human skeleton?