OBJECTIONS A GAINS T E VOL UTION. 145 



beginning of the present century. During the 

 French occupation of Egypt, from 1797 to 1801, the 

 men of science who accompanied the army made a 

 large collection of the embalmed bodies of conse- 

 crated animals and sent them home to swell the 

 treasures of the museums of Paris. Some idea of the 

 enthusiasm excited by the reception of these precious 

 remains of an age long past, may be formed from 

 the following passage of an official report regard- 

 ing them drawn up by Cuvier, Lamarck and Lace- 

 pede, professors in the Museum of Natural History. 

 " It seems," they write, "as if the superstition of 

 the ancient Egyptians had been inspired by nature 

 with a view of transmitting to after ages a monu- 

 ment of her history. That extraordinary and eccen- 

 tric people, by embalming with so much care brutes 

 which were the objects of their stupid adoration, 

 have left us, in their sacred grottoes, cabinets of 

 zoology almost complete. The climate has con- 

 spired with the art of embalming to preserve the 

 bodies from corruption, and we can now assure 

 ourselves by our own eyes what was the state of a 

 great number of species three thousand years ago. 

 We can scarcely restrain the transports of our imag- 

 ination on beholding thus preserved, with their 

 minutest bones, with the smallest portions of their 

 skin, and in every particular most perfectly distin- 

 guishable, many an animal, which at Thebes or 

 Memphis, two thousand or three thousand years 

 ago, had its own priests and altars." ' 



1 "Annales du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle," Tom. I, p. 234. 



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