A still more interesting question arises as to who owns the corpse. It has been generally held that there is no property in it. Blackstone remarks, that, although the heir has a property in the monuments or escutcheons of his ancestor, he has none in his body or ashes. According to the law of England, after the death of a man, his executors have a right to the possession and custody of his body (although they have no property in it) until it is properly buried. A man cannot dispose of his body by will or any other instrument [419]. A contract for the sale of a corpse, even to doctors, will not be enforced; it cannot be made an article of merchandise [420]. The relatives have the right of interring the body, and when this right is once exercised they have no further interest in it than to protect it from injury [421]. In Indiana, the Courts have diverged somewhat from the beaten track, and held that the surviving relatives are entitled to the corpse in the order of inheritance as property, and that they have a right to dispose of it as such, subject to whatever burial regulations are reasonable and proper for the public health and advantage [422]. The English Anatomy Act, as has been seen, gives the executor or other person having the lawful possession of the body of any deceased person power to permit it to be anatomically examined. In England, the earlier writers on criminal law say nothing of the taking of a body from the grave, except that it is not theft. East, however, calls it a great misdemeanor; and there have been several convictions for this as an offence at Common Law. Doubtless the belief that it was an offence at Common Law was nearly connected |154| with the idea of the bodies being used for the dark purposes of the necromancer, and it would appear that no distinct authority upon the abstract point has been found in ancient legal records [423]. It is still an indictable offence, punishable with fine and imprisonment, or both [424]. And this even though the body has been taken in the interest of science, and for the purpose of dissection; or even if the motives of the offender were pious and laudable. In _Lynn’s_ case—(Lynn was indicted for entering a burying ground, taking a coffin up, and carrying away a corpse for the purposes of dissection)—it was urged that the offence was cognizable only by the ecclesiastical courts; but the Judges of the King’s Bench said that common decency required that a stop should be put to the practice; that it was an offence cognizable in a criminal court as being highly indecent, and _contra bonos mores_, at the bare idea alone of which nature revolted; that the purpose of taking up the body for dissection did not make it less an indictable offence. They refused to stay proceedings, but inasmuch as Lynn might have committed the deed merely through ignorance, they only fined him five marks. Since then others have been more severely dealt with. And in a very recent case,