ourishment, because
every action is stilled within it.

But this must be a dull subject of speculation for you, and your mind is
perhaps wandering thence to more practical views. It has struck you
possibly, not without an uncomfortable misgiving, that this obscure, but
unpleasant event may happen to yourself, and what on earth is there to
prevent _your_ being buried alive?

If you wish individually to be as safe as possible, leave by will to
some eminent surgeon, not your habitual attendant, L50, and his railway
expenses, &c., to be paid him for opening your body, when you are
certainly dead; L25 if he opens you, finds you alive, and succeeds in
sewing you up, and keeping you so; L200, on the contrary, to be expended
in indicting him for manslaughter if you die under his hands. I do not
venture to affirm that with all these precautions you would be perfectly
safe. The eminent Vesalius, surgeon, and a favourite of the Emperor
Charles V., with all his experience and knowledge, was unlucky enough to
open a Spanish nobleman by mistake, while he was yet alive. The
consequences, no doubt, were more serious than they would be now.
Vesalius hardly escaped the claws of the Inquisition, and died during
his expiatory pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

If, more comprehensively, you should wish to save others, as well as
yourself, from this awful risk, and have a friend in the legislature,
urge him, or otherwise Mr Wakley, to move for the insertion in any
convenient bill a clause to appoint in every district a qualified
officer to license burials; he had better not be a practising doctor,
but his office might embrace necroscopic inquiries for the coroner, and
the registrarship of births and deaths.

In either case, I would recommend you to offer publicly a premium of
L500, to be paid at the expiration of three years, for the best treatise
upon the signs of death; the same being calculated to form a useful body
of instruction, as yet wanting, either for your private surgeon, or the
new officials.

In England, indeed, our decent respect for the dead, which leads us to
postpone interment as long as possible, is a tolerable security against
being buried alive. The coffin is seldom closed upon the remains, before
decomposition has already commenced. _That_ is death's certain seal;
nor, in the present state of our knowledge, special cases of course
excepted, is it right to consider life surely extinct, till the impress
of that seal is pe