,
the evils of earth-burial did not manifest themselves so soon or in so
marked a manner as in the Old World. But there were instances enough to
convince the most incredulous that a radical change must be made. Dr.
Ackerly, writing in 1822, thus describes the condition of the
burial-ground connected with Trinity Church, New York, forty years
before: "During the Revolutionary War this ground emitted pestilential
vapors, the recollection of which is not obliterated from the memory of
a number of living witnesses." In the same year, the _Commercial
Advertiser_ published an article in reference to the present evils of
earth-burial at the same place, in which it was said: "It will be
remembered that the graveyard, being above the streets on the west, and
encompassed by a massive stone wall, and the east side being on a level
with Broadway, it results that this body of earth, the surface of which
has no declivity to carry off the rain, thus becomes a great reservoir
of contaminating fluids suspended above the adjacent streets. In proof
of this, it is stated that, in a house in Thames Street, springs of
water pouring in from that ground occasioned the removal of the tenants
on account of their exceeding fetidness." At a later date, Dr. Elisha
Harris brought this telling indictment against the same place of
interment: "Trinity churchyard has been the centre of a very fatal
prevalence of cholera whenever the disease has occurred as an endemic
near or within a quarter of a mile of it. Trinity Place, west of it,
Rector Street, on its border, the streets west of Rector and the
occupants of the neighboring offices and commercial houses have suffered
severely at each visitation of the pest from 1832 to 1854." It seems
hardly necessary to add that the foregoing statements are not intended
to make the impression that there was a worse condition at the
churchyard named than at any other....

It may now be said: "Yes, this is all true, but we have changed all
that! We no longer inter our dead in churchyards or burial-grounds
within the limits of cities. We have provided cemeteries at great
distances from our cities and large centres of population, and there the
dead can do no harm."

To this the reply is easy and convincing: "that, if the dead endanger
the living when the population is dense, they certainly also endanger
them when the population is sparse. The danger is only diluted. It still
exists, and it ought to alarm us just as tr