It was a curious skull that some grave-openers in Ohio stood gazing upon last week. It bore a copper nose, supplied by a mortician who evidently knew that cartilage decays and that one would not want to enter the courts of Heaven without full facial equipment. It had a copper helmet, intricately carved and fitted with copper rods a foot long for the dead man's elaborate coiffure, long since returned to dust.

Scattered in heaps within the skeleton's ribs, arranged in lines beneath the thorax and shoulders as though dropped from decayed strings, lay...