166 MEMOIR OF GEOFFEOY SAINT HILAIRE. 



of the fixedness of species, an important fact, which he was destined 

 afterwards to dispute. 



A special interest attaches to the human mummies which he col- 

 lected. Volney had just revived the idea that the people of ancient 

 Egypt belonged to the negro race, and considered the question de- 

 termined by one or two phrases of certain historians, who say, in effect, 

 that the skin of the Egyptians was black. Volney is mistaken. The 

 color of the skin is here not the decisive feature; it is the form of the 

 skull, and the skull of the mummies leaves not a doubt. Whatever 

 may have been their tint, the celebrated people, among whom all 

 tradition places the first cradle of the sciences, pertained to the same 

 race of men with ourselves. 



Voltaire has styled Herodotus, "The father of history, who has 

 bequeathed us so many fables." Geoffrey seems to have taken upon 

 himself the task of justifying, as far as the naturalist is concerned, 

 whatever is most marvellous in the honest statements of the first of ob- 

 servers. Herodotus tells us, for instance, that the crocodile is, of all 

 animals, that which is proportionably the smallest at first and largest 

 at full size; the only one whose upper jaw is moveable upon the 

 lower; the only one which has no tongue, <fec. ; and all this may be 

 said to be true, if due allowance be made for the inaccurate language 

 of a writer who is no man of science and makes no pretensions to be 

 so. The crocodile, which attains as much as seventeen cubits in 

 length, springs from an egg scarcely seventeen lines long. Its upper 

 jaw does not move on the skull, but this jaAV and the skull, being 

 united, move on the lower one. It has a tongue, but so short that it 

 can make no use of it. The historian goes on to say that when the 

 crocodile lays its head on the bank of the Nile to inhale air. a small 

 bird enters with confidence into the redoubtable orifice of its throat and 

 shelters there in safety, while the crocodile does it no hurt nor makes 

 even a single movement for fear of alarming its little guest. This 

 Geoffrey had witnessed: a minute bird (the ijetit pluvier of Bufifon) 

 does, in fact, enter the throat of the crocodile, and exercises with en- 

 tire impunity the functions of relieving the animal of the insects 

 which attach themselves to its palate and which the shortness of its 

 tongue disables it from removing by any effort of its own. 



From the time of his arrival in Egypt Geotfroy had applied himself 

 to an attentive study of the fishes of the Nile. Among those which he 

 most wished to examine was the Silurus electricus^ which the Arabs, 

 in their language, not unaptly call the thunderbolt. Though he had 

 often inquired for this fish, he was able to obtain a specimen only a 

 few" days before the capitulation of Alexandria, and it was amidst the 

 perils of the siege, whilst bullets were whistling around his ears, that 

 he might have been seen, like another Archimedes, absorbed in the 

 meditation of problems of equal interest. His research Avas di- 

 rected to that secret bond which connects electricity with the prin- 

 ciple of life. But Geoffrey, whatever his passion for knowledge, 

 found, as others have done, that the impenetrable mj^stery of life is, 

 like the Isis of Egypt, covered with a veil which no mortal can raise. 

 It was in the midst of these preoccupations that he learned that, by 



