Dr. John Murray, inspector-general of hospitals in Bengal, India, wrote a book, in which he endeavored to determine whether or not cholera can be propagated by human remains. He declares emphatically (Propagation of Cholera, 1873, p. 216), that the body of a cholera patient, dead or alive, must be regarded as an agent of transmission of the disease; and adduces the sequent facts to prove his assertion. Several women, whose business it was to lay out corpses, had contracted cholera. In 1818 a man died of the dread disease; five fellow-men, who carried his body to the last resting-place, were taken down with cholera, and died in the night after the burial. Dr. Townsend reported that, in 1869, three men were commissioned by the police to carry a corpse to Dumwahi. The day following their arrival the cholera appeared in this city, and the first to die of the scourge were the three who had borne the corpse. Cholera from time to time threatens to invade our peaceful land. When it comes, shall we, in view of what has just been shown, bury its victims, saturate the earth with its specific germs, which, if the grave should ever be disturbed, may breed a terrible pestilence, if not during our lifetime, yet surely during that of our descendants? There can be but one answer: To secure ourselves against a repetition of epidemics, we must burn our dead; it is a duty that cannot be evaded, that we owe to all mankind, that, when sinned against, as it has been in the past, is revenged by the resulting visitation. When the cases above related are taken into consideration, even the most vehement anti-cremationist cannot deny that the specific germs of infectious and contagious diseases are propagated by earth-burial, and that the only sure medium for their destruction is fire, for no disease germ can pass through the rosy heat of the crematory and survive to propagate its species. [Illustration: FURNACE OF THE CINCINNATI CREMATORIUM. (Designed by M R. Conway.) ] The scientific world was lately startled by the gladsome news that Dr. Domingo Freire, a physician of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, had discovered the peculiar microbe of yellow fever. The blood of yellow fever patients swarms with these microbes (_cryptococci_), which, by inoculation, produce the disease in animals. Dr. Freire named the microbe _cryptococcus xanthogenicus_. He was aided in his labors, to detect the specific germ of yellow fever, which included microscopic and spectroscopic examinations as well as experiments on animals, by his able assistant, Señor Menezes Doria.