Kate Field, the well-known author and lecturer, says: “These are times that are trying men’s and women’s bodies quite as much as their souls. The zymotic diseases breaking out in what were formerly healthy villages may set even the blindest to seek for causes; and perhaps the most prejudiced may finally be forced to admit that one great source of water contamination is the existence of multitudinous graveyards contiguous to habitations. In my daily excursions on horseback, which cover about 15 miles, I count seven graveyards perched on hills, the occupants of the adjacent towns preparing for speedy exit from this world by living below the dead and using well-water. Suggest to them that the prevailing ‘malaria’ may be due to drinking up the remains of their deceased ancestors, and a howl of ‘sacrilege’ rends the air.” And in an admirable essay on cremation in the St. Louis _Daily Globe-Democrat_ of July 12, 1885, this graceful writer, deservedly noted, states:— “New England villages, once so free from ills, are taking on the airs of invalids; and it is often a question whether families that remain in big towns during the summer are not better off than their wealthier neighbors, who hie to overcrowded so-called watering places, not unfrequently returning with germs of typhoid fever in their systems, that later breaks forth to their amazement, and for which they are at a loss to account. They forget how they drank well-water, the springs of which percolated through peaceful village graveyards. Man’s worst enemies are his own superstition and ignorance. “I learned by terrible experience when very young the horrors of earth burial. I now know its crime against the living.” Miss Field is not only converted to but convinced of incineration, convinced that it is preferable to any other method; the moment a cremation society was incorporated in New York, she became a member. Col. R. E. Whitman, U. S. A., remarks: “People who wonder at the change that has come over our New England villages, the homes of a vigorous ancestry, and deplore the advent of this mysterious ‘malaria,’ the unseen vampire that sucks the red blood of the present generation, would do well to look about them and see how the graveyards, old and new, have grown in two centuries, how the town has surrounded them; how the water supply is from the same old wells; how the town, never having arrived at a magnitude seeming to demand a sewerage system, allows the refuse of generations to mingle with the surface soil. It would be a theme worthy of the magic pen of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Imagine his description of water percolating through the grave of some despised Lazarus, feeding the well of his life enemy, Dives, and compelling him daily to quaff the poison his own cruel ignorance had distilled.”