The artist W. P. Firth, like many others in recent times, requested that his body should be cremated, saying that “the duty of the individual to his kind includes providing for such final disposal of his body as shall be least detrimental to those who survive him, and that the modern process of incineration provides the quickest and safest mode of such disposal.” As unsentimental was the mind of the New York citizen who instructed his executors to have made out of his bones circular buttons of dimensions from one half an inch to one inch in diameter, to have the skin of his body tanned and made into pouches; and to have violin strings made out of such parts as might be suitable, adding: “I hereby give unto my beloved friend James Hayes the buttons, violin-strings and tanned skin made out of my body as aforesaid, the same to be by him distributed according to his discretion to my intimate friends.” The belief, it is said, that in the human body exists useful material which should not be wasted led this testator to give such strange directions: he did not believe in ordinary unhygienic and wasteful modes of burial, and hoped that his example might be followed. With the will of John Angell, of Stockwell, dated September 21, 1774, we may make an end. He seems to have been a man of ambitious ideas. He made provision for a “College or Society of seven decayed or unprovided for gentlemen,” and had the temerity to name as trustees the Archbishops of Canterbury and of York and the Lord Chancellor, “the great personages whom I have presumed to appoint to this trust,” as he himself says.