company, would enter the ground secretly,
rob a grave, and leave it exposed, to awaken
horror in the parish. Thus they begot
nightwatches, and spoilt the market of their
enemies. Again, the dead were stolen
sometimes from their beds, out of the chambers
of death, and this was the only manner of
desecration by which the poor were not the
chief sufferers. The window of the darkened
chamber being usually left a little way open,
and watchers by the corpse not being
customary in houses of the rich, thieves
entering by the window laid their hands on the
unburied.

In those days, too, if anybody was found
drowned in a canal and brought to shore, it
was a common thing for some ruffian to affect
loud grief, to claim the corpse as that of a
dear wife or daughter, and cause it to be
carried to the lodging, out of which it
presently departed in a sack to be exchanged for
nine or ten pieces of gold. The body was
thus in every sense disposed of. After a few
days under the hands of the dissector all
trace of its identity had vanished. Here
was, for society, the most terrible fact of all.
When the value of a dead body was great,
when towns were full of unconsidered friendless
men whom nobody would miss, and
whose muscles and bones were as valuable as
those of kings, the last hindrance to crime
in the minds of those who feared only the
vengeance of the law was removed, for the
perplexing question, how to destroy the
evidence of crime remaining in the body of
the victim, was removed entirely, and the
price of blood was paid by the same hand
that destroyed the evidence of guilt.

For some time murder had been one
source — of course a comparatively small
source, still a source — of supply to the
dissecting-rooms, and had not been suspected
by the surgeons, though there were some few
of them whom the habit of receiving into
schools of anatomy subjects for the use of
pupils without any close inquiry into the
manner of obtaining them, led to a degree of
negligence unquestionably criminal. The
truth first flashed upon the country at
Edinburgh. A. half-witted man, friendless, but
well known to sight in Edinburgh streets,
was no more seen. Edinburgh is not so
large a town but that a man well known by
sight can be missed, and his disappearance
talked about. Some question arose as to the
disappearance of Daft Jamie, into the midst
of which a medical student brought the news
that he had seen him on a certain day and at
a certain time laid out in a certain dissecting-
room. Nearly about the same time he was
known to have been in the street alive and
hale as usual. Clamour arose. The house
of Dr. Knox (to whom the dissecting-room in
question belonged) was stormed by the populace,
and the doctor was mobbed.

The trial of William Burke, whose name
has added a word to the English language,
took place at Edinburgh, on the day before
Christmas Day in the year eighteen hundred
and twenty-eight. He was tried for three
murders, Hare being evidence against him,
and confessed, after conviction, that within a
few months he and Hare had committed
sixteen murders, selling the body in each case
to Dr. Knox in Surgeon's Square. When
trafficking, they represented to the Doctor,
to avert suspicion, that they had purchased
these bodies, of relations of the dead in
different parts of the town. No suspicion seemed
to have been excited. Hare kept a lodging-
house, and tried lodgers with drink. If they
would drink till they lay powerless on the
floor, they were then suffocated — one man
holding the mouth, nose, and chin, the other
holding the whole body down and pressing on
the breast. It was only at the previous
Christmas that Hare, having joined with
Burke to sell the body of a lodger who had
died in his debt, first learned with how little
inquiries dead bodies were taken, and how
well they were paid for. A twelvemonth
contained everything; the temptation, the
multitude of murders, the conviction, and
the sentence to be hanged.

In eighteen hundred and thirty-one, a
similar career of murder was cut short in
London by the detection of Bishop and
Williams. They were professed body
snatchers. Bishop had followed the business
for twelve years, and had sold, he said, from
five hundred to a thousand bodies; but he
confessed to only three murders: that of a boy,
which led to his detection, that of a wretched
woman whom he found sitting desolate with
a child in her arms on the step of a door near
Shoreditch church, and that of a poor boy,
whom he and Williams found sleeping in the
pig-market in Smithfield. As professed
resurrection-men, their appearance with a
body at a London hospital tended more to
deaden than excite suspicion of foul play;
but Mr. Partridge, then demonstrator, now
professor, of anatomy at King's College, when
the body of one of their victims was brought
to the dissecting-room of that medical school,
perceived a double reason for suspicion. The
body was recently dead, the rigidity of death
was upon it, the limbs were doubled and had
not been laid out; and, at the same time, one
of the men, by whom it was brought,
volunteered an obvious falsehood, in saying that it
had been taken "in the regular way" — meaning,
from a grave. The police were sent for;
and, to detain the suspected men, until they
came, Mr. Partridge produced a fifty pound
note for their payment, and asked for change.
They offered to go for change, but the
anatomist preferred going himself, and bidding
them await his return, went out to hasten,
the arrival of the officers of justice. There
was a very bare case for suspicion. Had the
men said, that the boy was found drowned
(for indeed he had been suffocated in a well),
it might have been supposed that he was