Mr. Seymour Haden resumed the subject of " Earth to
Earth', in the Times of Thursday, with a stream of soft eloquence on which the Pall Mall justly commented as apparently rather calculated to give aesthetic than physiological guidance to the world in relation to the burial of its dead. His letter, indeed, is a very elaborate study, in that bland school of medical rhetoric which derives its inspiration half from the sonorous roll of technical terms, and half from the happy consciousness of diffusing respect and awe through the minds of nurses and invalids. He descants on the "compara- tively benign disintegration"—a most imposing phrase—which overtakes the body simply committed to the ground, speaks twice of the 4q.cazavaig which attends proper burial without either translating or explaining that magnificent word,—we have not the least idea what the first three syllables of it mean,—digresses into eloquent panegyric of the observant eye which climbs " the Pelion upon Ossa of cumulus and stratus" in a cloudy sky, and censure of the negligent eye which ignores these beauties,—all by way of illustrating the "eyes" and "no eyes" which discern or fail to discern the true signs of death,—and finally becomes so en- thusiastic about the funeral rites that we almost lose the physio- logist in the consultative poet. The "trellised coffin," "garnished and beautified by loving hands," is made the subject of a prose idyl. However, there is really nothing of value in the letter to add to what Mr. Seymour Haden said in January, except that to a properly qualified observer the danger of a premature burial, arising from any confusion between a swoon and death, is absolutely nil,—the temperature of the body alone being a sufficient test ; and on this point Mr. Seymour Haden is confirmed by the testimony of half-a-dozen of the most eminent members of his profession.
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