Objections of this nature can only provoke a smile. In a country like ours, where many of the cadavers which are dissected in our medical schools are stolen from the graveyards, the proposed introduction of cremation must, no doubt, raise a storm among teachers of anatomy, who are fearful that the supply of corpses will be cut short by the reform. It is not to be wondered at, that the anatomists raise a cry of alarm, for, indeed, I know of no other method of disposal of the dead that is as damaging to their relations with the defunct as cremation. Even a professor of the Jefferson Medical College, a man who ought to have known better, joined the anti-cremationists for these reasons. Every educated person knows that a thorough knowledge of anatomy is essential to the successful practice of medicine and surgery, and that a familiarity with the internal workings of the human system can be gained in no other way under the sun. But although I belong to the medical fraternity, I can but wish that such a terrible and desecrating practice as grave-robbing be put a stop to. It is for the government of each state to provide fully for the dissecting-rooms of the medical colleges, to deliver to them all who die in prisons and poor-houses. Prisoners should not be given up, even when claimed by relatives or friends; the idea that the commission of crime may land one on the dissecting-table may deter many from trespassing the laws of their country. What difference it makes whether future generations know, or do not know, how our skulls compared with that of a gorilla, I cannot conceive. Let the craniologists and allied scientists make their investigations now and record them in books. Printed matter of value is immortal. How the archæologists and anthropologists, ignoring the printing press, can imagine (for such fears only dwell in their imagination and have no real foundation) that without the records of the tombs the present age, its acts and deeds, might pass away from the ken of posterity as completely as the ancient civilizations of Central America and Malacca, I am unable to explain. But even if dire oblivion should be the ultimate doom of the nineteenth century, the opinion of the world two thousand years hence is of little consequence when compared with the health of those now inhabiting it. In the words of the learned rector of the University of Padua, Professor Coletti: “Man should disappear and not rot; he should no more be transformed into a mass of corruption—the source of filthy and injurious exhalations—than into a grotesque mummy, a shapeless mixture of pitch, resin, and perfumes; man should become a handful of ashes and nothing more.” “Would not cremation rob nature of its supply of ammonia?”