It has taught parties resident in large cities that the very air they
live in reeks with human remains, which steam up from graves; and
which, of course, they are continually breathing. So it makes our
churchyards to be worse haunted than they were formerly believed to
be by ghosts, and, I may add, vampyres, in consequence of the dead
continually rising from them in this unpleasant manner. Indeed,
Science is likely to make people dread them a great deal more than
Superstition ever did, by showing that their effluvia breed typhus and
cholera; so that they are really and truly very dangerous. I should
not be surprised to hear some sanitary lecturer say, that the fear of
churchyards was a sort of instinct implanted in the mind, to prevent
ignorant people and children from going near such unwholesome places.

It would be comparatively well if the mischief done us by Science,
Medicine and Chemistry, and all that sort of thing--stopped here. The
mere consideration that burial in the heart of cities is unhealthy,
would but lead to extramural interment, to which our only
objection--though even that is no very trifling one--is that it
would diminish mortality, and consequently our trade. But this
Science--confound it!--shows that the dead do not remain permanently
in their coffins, even when the sextons of metropolitan graveyards
will let them. It not only informs Londoners that they breathe and
drink the deceased; but it reveals how the whole of the defunct party
is got rid of, and turned into gases, liquids, and mould. It exposes
the way in which all animal matter as it is called in chemical
books--is dissolved, evaporates, and disappears; and is ultimately, as
I may say, eaten up by Nature, and goes to form parts of plants, and
of other living creatures. So that, if gentlemen really wanted to be
interred with the remains of their ancestors, it would sometimes
be possible to comply with their wishes only by burying them with a