During the month of March, 1781, and the half-year preceding it, an epidemic raged at Pasajes, Spain, which befell 127 persons, of which number 83 died. This epidemic was attributed to the poisonous vapors arising from the overcrowded vaults of the parish church. Trousseau mentions the case of a grave-digger who was attacked by small-pox soon after opening the grave of an individual who had died of that malady many years ago. Mr. Cooper charged an outbreak of small-pox in Eyam, Derbyshire, Eng., to the excavation of an old cemetery. A dispatch from Montreal, dated Oct. 26, 1885, states that a grave-digger of St. Sulpice, named Robitaille, made a grave next to where a man who died from small-pox a month ago was buried. At the time there was no small-pox in the village; but Robitaille, some days after digging the grave, sickened and finally died of small-pox, making it evident that he contracted the disease from the body of a man who had been buried for a month. Recent scientific discoveries confirm the opinion long held by persons endowed with common sense that the germs of many infectious and contagious diseases retain their vitality and the power to spread the respective malady in the grave and the layers of earth surrounding it. By means of these germs, yellow fever, cholera, small-pox, splenic fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and other diseases belonging to the same category, can be communicated from the dead to the living, even years after burial. Concerning splenic fever, which can be transmitted from animal to man, the great French investigator and pathologist, Louis Pasteur, says:— “Recently, we discovered the characteristic germs in pits in which animals dead of splenic fever (charbon) had been buried for 12 years; and their culture was as virulent as that from the blood of an animal recently dead. Anthracoid germs in the earth of pits in which animals have been buried are brought to the surface by earthworms; and in this fact we may find the whole etiology of the disease, inasmuch as the animals swallow these germs with their food.” The _British Medical Journal_ in 1880 commented on Pasteur’s great discovery as follows:—