The lifeless body of the vile criminal was given up to the anatomist. Of this fact alone no one need complain. But a community has a right to ask that anatomy should do its hideous work with some reserve--and instead of parading its loathsome details, should cast a veil over them. The execution was witnessed by a thousand, and the dissection by (as we may infer) some hundreds. An elaborate newspaper report informs us that the post mortem examination was made “in the anatomical theatre of the Philadelphia College of Medicine, by Professor James M‘Clintock, in the presence of a large audience of medical students, physicians, members of the press and others.” According to the report, it must have been a very theatrical sort of exhibition--the follies of phrenology contributing largely to enliven it. Science may have gained something by such a piece of work, and by the lecture that accompanied it: it is possible, we suppose, that the knowledge of the theory and practice of hanging may have been a little increased, and perhaps some small addition made to the science of anatomy: but when we are told by the reporter that the Professor who made the dissection was “pleasantly facetious,” in his performance, we must say, that if science gained any thing, it was at the expense of human feeling and of decency. _Pleasantry!--facetiousness!_ What an occasion for the exercise of such powers! We would fain hope that the reporter used the words inconsiderately and inappropriately, and that he must have done the Professor injustice: but if not--if the man of science, standing over the ghastly carcass of the broken-necked criminal, from which an undying soul had so lately passed forth so fearfully, did accompany his explorations with any sort of facetiousness; and if his “large audience” did at all sympathize with such ill-placed levity, then--not trusting ourselves to picture what sort of a scene it was--we will only say that thus conducted, the anatomical theatre is as brutalizing and demoralizing as the public hanging ground itself. When Hogarth, with all his wondrous powers of commingling the grotesque and the ghastly, carried the vicious apprentice on to the last scene in the dissecting room, he did not venture, if we remember rightly, to picture there a facetious anatomist. If we had space we should be disposed to comment somewhat at length on several points here presented, and others which have come to our knowledge from parties who were present, but we can only advert for a moment to the indirect influence of the published report of the examination.