too poor to meet the cost of the cheapest decent burial. Atop the
stack of regulation coffins were the nondescript receptacles made
use of by the very poor--the most pathetic a tiny box from the
corner grocery. The bodies, some dozens of them, lay like so much
merchandise, awaiting shipment.

"What a barbarity!" I heard Craig mutter, for even he, though now
and then forced to visit the place when one of his cases took him
there, especially when it was concerned with an autopsy, had never
become hardened to it.

Often I had heard him denounce the primitive appointments,
especially in the autopsy rooms. The archaic attempts to utilize
the Morgue for scientific investigation were the occasion for
practices that shocked even the initiated. For the lack of
suitable depositories for the products of autopsies, these objects
were plainly visible in rude profusion when a door was opened to
draw out a body for inspection. About and around the slabs whereon
the human bodies lay, in bottles and in plates, this material
which had no place except in the cabinets of a laboratory was
inhumanly displayed in profusion, close to corpses for which a
morgue is expected to provide some degree of reverential care.

"You see," apologized the keeper, not averse to throwing the blame
on someone else, for it indeed was not his but the city's fault,
"one reason why so many bodies have to remain uncared for is that
I could show you cooling box after cooling box with some subject
which figured during the past few months in the police records.
Why victims of murders committed long ago should be held
indefinitely, and their growing numbers make it impossible to give