For 300 years English churchyards have been so full that, like the one in Hamlet, Yorick’s bones have had to be dug out in order to put Ophelia’s in. From time to time the attention of the British authorities was directed to the shameful state of the cemeteries of the metropolis and other places. In that case the matter was brought before Parliament, the government ordered an investigation, a committee was appointed to examine the grievances, the committee returned a report with the testimony of witnesses, and the report was ordered printed. The report commonly made a very large volume, which looked exceedingly pretty on the shelf on which it was placed, but became dusty in a comparatively short time from non-use. The excitement had quieted down, public opinion and the press were pacified, Parliament was satisfied, and the condition of the burial-grounds remained the same as before. The cemeteries of Paris, France, are in no better condition; the mould in the old Cimetière des Innocents is literally saturated with corpses; Montmartre and Mont Parnasse are overcrowded. As for Père la Chaise,—the burial-place that has been praised in poetry and prose (the resting-place of Racine and Molière), that has been adjudged the most beautiful cemetery in the world,—Père la Chaise is packed with decaying bodies. A cable dispatch dated Dec. 27, 1883, reported that the municipal council of the city of Paris had resolved upon leaving those that fell during the reign of bloodthirsty La Commune at Père la Chaise for a period of 25 years. Ordinary cadavers must be dug up after five years, to make room for their ghastly successors. In Portugal the soil has become so packed with corpses that an effort was made to enact a law that after five years all interred bodies should be dug up and subjected to cremation. This means that after the dead have saturated the ground with disease-producing emanations, and have exhaled nearly all their virulent effluvia into the atmosphere, sacrificing the welfare of the living to superstition and prejudice, a later incineration shall take place to save space. Of American cemeteries, I only need mention Pottersfield of New York, the name of which is not spoken or heard by an American without an involuntary shudder. Our graveyards are, of course, not like the cemeteries of the Old World, where the exhumation of bones takes place daily to make room for the recently deceased, but they will become so unless the damaging prejudices are laid aside and something is done to prevent such a poisonous and dangerous situation. In some of the old cemeteries in our cities it has become impossible to dig another grave.