Tarchini-Bonfanti, for 26 years _perito-medico_ (medical expert) at the tribunal of Milan, Italy, declares that during this time, although many thousands of litigations came before the court which was requested to pronounce judgment upon them, only in ten cases was it necessary to resort to exhumation. Only ten cases in 26 years, out of several thousands of lawsuits, and four only out of the ten exhumations led to the detection of the crime and the criminal. These four cases, however, occurred in a single lawsuit—that of Boggia. In this instance the disinterment would have taken place, even if cremation had been at the time an established and universal custom, for Boggia had buried his victims in his own cellar. Tarchini-Bonfanti asserts that exhumations for forensic purposes are extremely rare, and that those which are made yield either negative, or at best doubtful results. Disinterment, instead of furnishing an explanation, instead of shedding light upon some mystery, more often is followed by confusion, and may give rise to erroneous conclusions. It would be next to impossible to cremate a murdered person in a furnace of the ordinary kind. As to the poor and ignorant murderer, the regulation of cremation would make him shrink from submitting his victim to the authorities of a crematorium, and he would find it far more convenient and safe to inter the corpse secretly, as these criminals generally do at the present time. There are many poisons which, by a rapid change of their substance, are extremely difficult to detect in the human body after death, even after a short time, sometimes but a few days; for instance, cyanide of potassium, prussic acid, and at certain times phosphorus. But when a careful inquest, such as the cremationists propose, is held, poisoning by these agents cannot so easily escape detection. In poisoning by phosphorus, the yellow hue of the face of the victim would excite suspicion and lead to a post-mortem examination, when the characteristic sign of phosphorus poisoning in the fatty degeneration of the liver would be discovered. An autopsy would speedily make evident poisoning by pure prussic acid, for the open cavities of the body would exhale the odor of bitter almonds. Poisoning by cyanide of potassium can, of course, only be detected by a chemical analysis of the contents of the stomach, intestines, etc. I think I may safely affirm that it is impossible for the best of anatomists to determine the lesions, if there be any, of a decomposed body.