386 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.
live or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must die before their
proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now, when even the
children know that a dead saint enters upon a century-long career
of assassination the moment the earth closes over his corpse. It
is a grim sort of a thought. The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada,
have now, after nineteen hundred years, gone to curing the sick by
the dozen. But it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics,
within a generation after St. Anne's death and burial, made several
thousand people sick. Therefore these miracle-performances are simply
compensation, nothing more. St. Anne is somewhat slow pay, for a
Saint, it is true; but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred
years, and outlawed by the statute of limitations, than not paid at
all; and most of the knights of the halo do not pay at all. Where
you find one that pays—like St. Anne—you find a hundred and fifty
that take the benefit of the statute. And none of them pay any
more than the principal of what they owe—they pay none of the
interest either simple or compound. A Saint can never quite return
the principal, however; for his dead body kills people, whereas his
relics heal only—they never restore the dead to life. That part of
the account is always left unsettled.
'Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne, after fifty years of medical practice, wrote\
" The inhumation of human bodies, dead from infectious diseases, results in
constantly loading the atmosphere, and polluting the waters, with not only
the germs that rise from simply putrefaction, but also with the specific germs
of the diseases from which death resulted/*
* The gases (from buried corpses)will rise to the surface through eight or
ten feet of gravel, just as coal-gas will do, and there is practically no limit to
their power of escape.
4 During the epidemic in New Orleans in 1853, Dr. E. H. Barton reported
that in the Fourth District the mortality was four hundred and fifty-two
per thousand—more than double that of any other. In this district were
three large cemeteries, in which during the previous year more than three
thousand bodies had been buried. In other districts the proximity of
cenieteries seemed to aggravate the disease.
*In 1828 Professor Bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearance
of the plague at Modena was caused by excavations in ground where, three
hundred years previoitsly, the victims of the pestilence had been buried. Mr.
•Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics, remarks that the opening