moral sense, that its adoption would be an eternal disgrace to American jurisprudence. The establishment of a right so sacred and precious ought not to need any judicial precedent. Our courts of justice should place it, at once, where it should fundamentally rest forever, on the deepest and most unerring instincts of human nature, and hold it to be a self-evident right of humanity, entitled to legal protection, by every consideration of feeling, decency, and Christian duty. The world does not contain a tribunal that would punish a son who should resist, even unto death, any attempt to mutilate his father's corpse, or tear it down. the grave for sale or dissection; but where would he find the legal right to resist, except in his peculiar and exclusive interest in the body?
The right to the repose of the grave necessarily implies the right to its exclusive possession. The doctrine of the legal right to open a grave in a cemetery, after a certain lapse of time, to receive another tenant, however it may be sanctioned by custom in the English church-yards, or by Continental usage at Père-la-Chaise and elsewhere, will hardly become acceptable to the American mind, still less the Italian practice of hastening the decomposition of the dead by corrosive elements. The right to the individuality of a grave, if it exist at all, evidently must continue, so long as the remains of the occupant can be identified—and the means of identifying can only be secured and preserved by separate burial. The due and decent preservation of human remains by separate burial is preeminently due to Christian civilization, which, bringing in the coffin and sarcophagus, superseded the heathen custom of burning, and "gave," in Lord Stowell's vivid phrase, "final extinction to the sepulchral bonfires."
| THE RELATIONS OF WOMEN TO CRIME. |
By ELY VAN DE WARKER, M. D.
II.
I SHALL, in this paper, consider briefly the sexual and other physical and mental conditions which modify woman's relations to crime. These conditions (B) mainly depend upon—1. Age; 2. Heredity; 3. Physical; and 4. Mental sexual peculiarities. In a former paper of this series,[1] I believe I proved, beyond a doubt, that there are types of mind which are purely the outcome of sex, and which define the mental condition of the sexes. In that paper, criminal statistics were used to assist in establishing the fact of sexual mental differences. Here the method is reversed, and sexual mental traits are employed to explain the known differences in the extent and degree of crime
- ↑ Popular Science Monthly, July, 1875.
