THE VITALITY OF SEEDS 323 



" Not for a long time afterwards was any doubt cast upon the 

 truth of it. Then a friend, who had lived many yearn in Egypt, 

 told us that he very well remembered seeing the very coffins lying 

 heaped up in the palace stables of the Khedive along with the 

 fodder for the horses. It appeared that Ismail kept, as specimens 

 of the most interesting product of his country, a store of mummies 

 in their cases ready to present to distinguished visitors who came 

 to see him. 



" What doubtless happened was that the dry air of the stables, 

 or the rough usage to which the mummy was subjected, caused 

 the wood of the case to warp and split, or the clay luting joining 

 the two halves to break, and through the interstices the oats filtered 

 in. It had previously been noted as odd that only four seeds were 

 found, and that these were of similar character to varieties then in 

 cultivation. 



" Echoes of this story are still to be heard. Only a week or two 

 ago an inquiry was made by the editor of a newspaper as to whether 

 it would be safe to publish an article from a contributor about some 

 seeds of the moon-flower obtained from a bridal wreath found upon 

 the head of a 5,000-year-old mummy of an Egyptian Princess, which 

 had afterwards grown and flowered in America. My answer was in 

 the negative. The stoiy, though the author, not being a botanist, 

 did not know it, was lacking in verisimilitude. The moon-flower, 

 Ipomcea, is a native of tropical America, and for a wreath of it to 

 have been found on the head of an Egyptian princess at that time 

 meant that America must have been discovered by the Egyptians 

 4,000 years before Columbus, which is absurd." 



Mr. North adds : " In an experiment I made some years ago with 

 seeds of Nelumbium from Egypt, the seeds were kept in an incubator, 

 in water at 90 degrees, for three months. At the end of that time 

 they were still so hard it was only possible to break them with a 

 hammer. I then tried scratching the skin of some with a file, and 

 to my surprise these germinated in 24- hours." 



Mr. Carruthers contributed to Nature Notes for January, 1895, 

 an interesting paper on the alleged germination of mummy wheat, 

 which we may at some time reprint. In the course of this he refers 

 to the most authentic case of old seeds germinating, as established by 

 Kobert Brown on seeds of a Nelumbium. These had come from 

 Sloane to the British Museum, in the Botanical Department of 

 which they still are — the Quarterly Summary erroneously places 

 them in the College of Surgeons: they had certainly been in the 

 boxes in which Brown found them for a hundred and fifty years. 



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