In the churchyard at Cobham, in Surrey, England, on account of some changes in the church, some bodies had to be raised. The work of the navvies was horrible beyond description, and dangerous beside. It was performed very early in the morning, and was beset with difficulties. Repeated doses of gin had to be given to the men to keep them at a kind of work which they could only do under the influence of alcohol. Three men perished in 1852, at Paris, from inhaling the gas that escaped from coffins. Fourcroy affirms that grave-digging is an unhealthy and dangerous occupation, and that all grave-diggers he examined showed symptoms of slow poisoning. George A. Walker declared that no grave-digger ever wholly escaped the influence of graveyard gases. Some of the men employed in this way have noticed the peculiar smell of the gases on beginning to dig. Monsieur Patissier reports several deaths due to grave-digging; and Mr. Chadwick asserts that the vocation of a sexton shortens life one-third. Usually grave-diggers are heavy drinkers; they take to drinking to resist the malignant influence of the vapors which arise slowly but surely out of the cemetery soil, and to do away with any “maudlin sentimentality” that may still linger in their hearts, and that might interfere with their horrible work. On March 1, 1886, Marke Thornton, of Washington, Ga., met with a singular death. His decease resulted from inhaling poisonous gas which seeped through into a grave he was digging by the side of another. The other men at work with him left the grave as soon as they detected the gas, but Thornton, thinking there was no danger in it, remained and died. The action of cemetery gases on the human body manifests itself in a variety of ways. Sir T. Spencer Wells states that decomposing human remains so pollute earth, air, and water as to diminish the general health and average duration of life. Dr. Lyon Playfair affirms that the inspiration of graveyard gases does not always cause one form of decay or putrefaction, but that it depends entirely upon the organs attacked. Entering the blood, it produces fever; communicated to the viscera, it gives origin to diarrhœa, and may, Dr. Playfair thinks, even be the source of consumption. When the irrespirable gas enters the respiratory tract, Dr. Southwood Smith claims that it is conveyed into the system through the thin and delicate walls of the air-vesicles of the lungs in the act of respiration. He states that turpentine, for instance, if only inhaled when passing through a room that was recently painted, will exhibit its effects in some of the fluid excretions of the body even more rapidly than if it had been taken into the stomach. Dr. Riecke thinks that putrid emanations operate also through the olfactory nerves by powerful, penetrating, and offensive smells. Cemeteries are breeding grounds as well as foci of disease and death. [Illustration: THE CREMATORIUM AT WOKING, ENGLAND.]