Dr. Buck, in his excellent work on Hygiene, writes: “It is impossible for any one to say how long the _materies morbi_ may continue to live underground. If organic matter can be boiled and frozen without losing its vitality, and seeds 3000 years old will sprout when planted, it would be hardihood to assert that the poison of cholera, or small-pox, or typhus may not for years lie dormant, but not dead, in the moist temperature of the grave.” Dr. Wheelhouse, of Leeds, England, says: “Do we not shun, and that most wisely, the presence of those afflicted with infectious diseases as long as they remain amongst us; and yet, no sooner are they removed by death than we are content, with tender sympathy indeed, and most loving care, it is true (but with how much wisdom?) to lay them in the ground, that they may slowly dissipate their terribly infectious gases through the soil, and saturating that, may thereby recharge the rains of heaven as they filter through it, with all their virulence and terrible power of reproduction in the systems of the living. I am not the thorough and entire believer in the disinfecting and depurating power of the soil that I once was, for terrible examples of its failure have, in my judgment, come under my notice.” Often the site of an old grave is used to make a new one, and in consequence earth is brought to light that is saturated with the effluvia of corpses of those who, perhaps, have died of some contagious or infectious disease. The crime that is committed by individuals when they bury persons deceased of such maladies is pithily expressed by that champion of modern cremation, Sir Henry Thompson, who says: “Is it not indeed a social sin of no small magnitude to sow the seeds of disease and death broadcast, caring only to be certain that they cannot do much harm to our own generation?” But such is selfish human nature! The first to show the connection between epidemics and the process of decomposition was Professor Pettenkofer, of Munich, Bavaria. He demonstrated that the presence of putrefying organic bodies, air, moisture, and warmth, in a porous soil, are the potent factors which originate and develop pestilential germs. The great mortality, the severity, that attended in former times the appearance of epidemics in cities where graveyards were situated in the center of a large population, illustrates the deadly influence which these “God’s acres” have. Saint Augustine pointed to the fact that epidemics are caused by decomposing organic bodies. Forestus reported many cases of malignant fever caused by the emanations of cadavers. Ambrose Paré, the renowned French surgeon, in 1562 demonstrated that a malignant (pestilential) fever, then raging in L’Agenois, was due to the putrid vapors arising from a neighboring well into which many dead bodies, soldiers fallen in battle, had been thrown.