Too horribly gruesome and revolting are the descriptions of these graveyards--places where the dead were, so to speak, shovelled in as the filth of the streets is into scavengers' carts, and which "gave forth the mephitical effluvia of death"; such a one as that in Russell Court, off Drury Lane, where the whole ground, which by constant burials had been raised several feet, was "a mass of corruption" which polluted the air the living had to breathe, and poisoned the well water which in default of other they often had to drink. Or those in Rotherhithe, where "the interments were so numerous that the half-decomposed organic matter was often thrown up to make way for fresh graves, exposing sights disgusting, and emitting foul effluvia." The master hand of Dickens has given a more vivid picture of one of these places than any to be found in Parliamentary Blue Books:-- "A hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed.... Into a beastly scrap of ground, which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination, and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring our dear brother here departed to receive Christian burial. With houses looking on on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate--with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life--here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two; here sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption; an avenging ghost at many a sick bedside; a shameful testimony to future ages, how civilisation and barbarism walked this boastful island together." Interments in the vaults of the churches--then a common practice--were also a fruitful source of sickness and death. It mattered not whether or not the bodies were hermetically closed in leaden coffins, for "sooner or later every corpse buried in the vault of a church spreads the products of decomposition through the air which is breathed, as readily as if it had never been enclosed"; thus adding to the contamination of the atmosphere. The death-roll from this horrible condition of things cannot be gauged, but those most conversant with the matter were firmly convinced that it was the direct cause of fevers, and of all kinds of sickness among the people. Pollution of the atmosphere which people had to breathe, and upon the purity of which the public health in varying degree depended, was caused also by various businesses and processes of manufacture grouped together under the name of "noxious trades," such as bone-boilers, india-rubber manufacturers, gut-scrapers, manure manufacturers, slaughterers of cattle, and many others. In 1849[25] a description had been given of a street in Shoreditch which shows to what extent this evil had attained:--