Are we never, even in these days of? marvellous advance in physiological knowledge, in medical and surgical science, for be set fre from the awful risk of being buried alive, the thought of which haunts so many even of the strungest-minded mon and women? As wollit may! For in the first place, "Think," says a writer on the gruesome subject in Chambers' Journal, of the horror and unspeakable anguish of the wretched being whose return to consciousness is but a prelude to a death than which it is impossible to realise anything more ghastly and terrible." And secondly, the peril of such a fate is proved by indisput-. able facts to exist.
Tu 1896, in the United Kingdom, no less. than 11,464 bodies wore laid in the ground without official examination to ascertain if life was extinct. The Home Secretary, questioned on this subject, remarked that he did not believe a certificate of death would be a guarantee against premature burial! A startling admission, verily, but, alas! all too true, in view of the fact nob less startling, that hundreds of deuthcottificates are given every year by medical who never seo their patients in the hour of death, nor oven after, so that their assurance in such cases is no guarantee at all. Nor is the eertific.to of a doctor who has merely seen the body thoroughly trustworthy, for exhumation has sometimes revealed the appalling fuct that even the certified "corpse" survived to dic a death so awful that the pen shrinks from attempting to describe it. No less an authority than Sir Henry Thompson tells us that it is easier for premature burial to take place in England than in France, under our present system of allowing many deaths to pass uncertified, and of medical men granting certificates' without having carefully examined the body.
It was doubtless the realisation of such possibilities which moved Wilkie Collins to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.