“Dr. Joseph Akerly expressed the belief that Trinity Churchyard had been an active cause of the yellow fever in New York in 1822, aggravating the malignity of the epidemic in its vicinity. This church was built in 1698, and the ground had been receiving the dead for 124 years. Sometimes bodies were buried only 18 inches below the surface, and it was impossible to dig without disturbing the remains. During the Revolutionary War, this burial-ground had emitted pestilential odors, and in 1781 Hessian soldiers were employed to cover the ground with a layer of earth two or three feet in depth. The ground was unusually offensive in 1782, and annoyed passengers on the surrounding streets previous to the appearance of the yellow fever in July. During the epidemic, the condition of this churchyard, and the virulence of the disease in its vicinity, called for some active measures, and on the night of Sept. 22 Dr. Roosa covered the ground with 52 casks of quicklime, the stench being at the time so excessive as to cause several laborers to vomit. On the 25th and 26th of the same month St. Paul’s Churchyard, and the vaults of the North Dutch Church in William Street, received the same treatment, these being likewise very offensive and foci of epidemics.” When the yellow fever raged in New Orleans in 1853, the death-rate in the Fourth District (in which there were three large burial-grounds) was 452 per 1000 of the population. Dr. Bryant, writing on yellow fever at Norfolk in 1855, regards cemeteries as a constant source of danger in an epidemic, and urges the total forbidding of intramural or even near-by suburban cemeteries. Sir Spencer Wells related a fact recently at a meeting of the Health Exhibition in London, England, which has a strong bearing on the source of epidemics and their annihilation by cremation. Some persons who had died of scarlet fever were interred in a country graveyard. Thirty years afterward the cemetery was included in a neighboring garden, and the old graves dug up. Scarlet fever forthwith broke out in the rectory and parish, and no other probable source having been discovered, it is impossible to avoid the inference that the germs of scarlatinal infection can retain their vitality a third of a century. In epidemics individuals should be forced to allow their dead (unless they succumb to some disease other than the prevailing scourge) to be cremated. To stamp out a contagious or infectious malady, or to arrest its progress, incineration must be made general; its benefits are _nil_ when confined to isolated cases. The individual must stand back when the public health is in jeopardy. Governments should not allow bodies to be introduced into their respective countries from an infected land, unless such bodies have been previously reduced to ashes.