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modern refinement and sickly sensibility. I am aware that where "the feebler faint" the energetic feel, and that sensibility, like other qualities, seeks an asylum on the lips when it has been banished from the heart. To understand the reason of embalming dead bodies, and bestowing them in costly sepulchres, it is necessary to refer to the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which opinion the Egyptians held in common with the Hindoos. The religions of both, in all probability, had one common origin. They believed in the same two principles of good and evil. The gods of the Egyptians little differed from those of the Hindoos; the Osiris of the former, the Isis, the Thoth, the Horus, and the Anubis were not very different in their attributes from the Brahma, the Bistnu, the Chrishna, the Seeb, and the Indra of the Hindoos. The ten incarnations of Brahma, the Castes coming from his four members, viz. mouth, arms, stomach, and feet, are only other versions of the various appearances of Osiris, and the dispersion of his scattered members over the earth.

That both people originally believed in one

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true God*, I think is evident, from the inscriptions found in both countries. A temple of Sais had this description of the Egyptian deity: "I am all that has existed, does exist, and ever shall exist; and my veil no mortal hath yet uncovered."

In the Hindoo Shaster the attributes of one God are thus enumerated in these sublime words: "The Supreme Being exists unseen, preeminent; that which is and must remain. He is the Almighty God, the prime Creator, the mansion of the world, the incorruptible Being distinguished from all transient things, the ancient Pooros, the supreme supporter of the universe, and by whom the universe is spread abroad. He is immaterial, therefore above all conception. He is invisible, and therefore can have no form; and from what we behold of his works, we may conclude that he is eternal! omnipresent! omnipotent! omniscient! and infinite in glory!"

The Egyptian process of embalming, however,

* Plutarch says, that the people of the Thebais worshipped only the immortal God under the name of Ptha: and, on Franklin's authority, the word made use of by the modern Copts to signify the Deity is Ptha.

was unknown in India; indeed it could be practised in no other country but in Egypt, where there was no dampness or moisture to counteract the antiseptic process. We have good reason to know it was not in general use among the Jews, though that people borrowed the fashion of their sepulchres from the Egyptians. In Jerusalem, as in Thebes, the tombs are cut in the sides of the mountains; there are the same galleries, charnels, and sarcophagi; and some of the same gaudy paintings are still to be found in a Jewish tomb adjoining the supposed sepulchre of Absalom. In Wady El Mousa, the tomb of Aaron, differs in nothing from one of the tombs at Gourna. Burckhardt mentions the splendour of this sepulchre, and the number of stone coffins sunk in the floor; but neither in the tomb of Aaron, nor in the sepulchre of the kings in Jerusalem, has a single mummy been found, nor any vestige of the balsamic preparations.

Had the climate of other eastern countries admitted of embalming, most probably that process would have been adopted; but, as I have said before, it was the dryness of the air of Upper Egypt only which mainly tended to prevent de

composition. In Lower Egypt, the mummies go to pieces on exposure to external air; and in Alexandria, where the air is excessively moist, I observed several mummies melt away, in a damp magazine where I kept them, and decomposition take place after an exposure of forty hours to the humid atmosphere, though the same bodies had resisted corruption in a dry air for perhaps forty centuries. In some churchyards in Europe, where the soil is calcareous, bodies are preserved for centuries.

In Toulouse, I saw several quite perfect after a lapse of one hundred and eighty years; and in the vaults of St. Michael's Church, in Dublin, I remember being shown the corpse of the unfortunate Henry Shears, who was hanged in 1798, and which, for preservation, rivalled any Egyptian mummy: the desiccating air of this vault does all that embalming can accomplish. Shakspeare was quite right in making water a sad "decayer of the dead body:" though it may be permitted to doubt the truth of the tanner's antiseptic nature*. The honours of a splendid

* It appears, by recent observation, that operative tanners are never the victims of pulmonary consumption. In the

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burial, which in the early days of Egypt were only bestowed on the virtuous citizen, or beneficent monarch, rendered every man desirous of deserving them. Both Jews and Egyptians excluded their bad kings from the sepulchre of their fathers. The Grecian fable of the judgment of Minos and Rhadamanthus had its origin in the funeral process of the Egyptians. The judges accompanied the corpse in a boat across the lake Moris, and on the other side of it decided on the just right of the remains to honourable interThe pilot, who steered the boat, was called Charon, in the Egyptian tongue; and at Thebes, it was customary in evidence of this inquest, to accompany the corpse across the Nile, with a small figure of a boat, which in the funeral processions, painted on the tombs, is invariably seen carried after the body. The only one of these boats which has ever been found in Thebes, I was fortunate enough to see a few days after its discovery. It was found by an Arab and purchased by Mr. Salt's agent. It is a complete

ment.

West Med. Soc. it was stated by a physician, that after six years' research, he never found one instance of a tanner's dying of tubercular phthisis.