Historical. 9 



Amenhotep are perhaps older than the Trojan war ! (Schweinfurth, 1883 

 b). In every case the preservation of the vegetable relics was as perfect 

 as in newly-dried herbarium specimens ; they were easily soaked out in 

 water, and Schweinfurth was able not only to identify them beyond doubt 

 and to find out the manner in which the wreaths were fastened together, 

 but also to prepare and mount examples for the Boolak Museum, where 

 his success is attested by eleven cases of plants. Specimens were also 

 sent to the British and several continental museums. A wreath of lotus 

 petals from the coffin of Ramses II was figured in Nature, in 1883 

 (Schweinfurth, 1883 b). Such a wreath consists of foliage leaves of 

 Mimusops schimperi folded in two or in four and stitched together with fibers 

 from the date-palm in such a manner as to clamp and hold the lotus petals 

 without piercing them ; the whole was then strung on strips of leaves of 

 the date-palm. The mummy marked rent had small whole flowers of 

 N. caerulea woven in the wreaths by means of papyrus threads. Some- 

 times, as in the case of the princess Nzi-Khonsu, the whole body of the 

 mummy was covered several layers deep with these garlands laid in 

 concentric semicircles from the chin downward. It is interesting to note 

 in passing, that Schweinfurth was not able to detect the slightest differ- 

 ence between these ancient plant remains and the species now growing in 

 Egypt. Either these species are not suffering transmutations, or the 

 changes are infinitely slow. Of real importance, however, is the con- 

 clusion that since the species are unchanged, the climate also of Egypt 

 must be very nearly the same as it was four thousand years ago. If this 

 be true, the absence of Nelumbo and Papyrus from modern Egypt cannot 

 be attributed to meteorological changes, but we are strengthened in the 

 conclusion that these plants only existed there in ancient times through 

 artificial, i. e. human, agencies, namely by cultivation. 



Several additional references to the Egyptian lotus are unquestion- 

 ably meant for a species of Nymphaea, but whether the blue or the white, 

 the writer cannot now say. Bes, probably a god adopted from the negro 

 tribes, was, at the end of the New Kingdom (500 b. c ?) " fused with . . . 

 and endowed with all the attributes of the young sun-god, and represented 

 like him as sitting upon a lotus flower" (Wiedemann, p. 167). Plutarch 

 says the Egyptians " characterize the sun as though it sprang every day 

 fresh out of the lotus plant" (Wilkinson, 3 : 132-3), and Proclus pretends 

 that the lotus was particularly typical of the sun, which it appeared to 

 honor by the expansion and contraction of its petals (1. c, p. 350). 

 Wilkinson indicates that this lotus is always N. lotus L. (p. 132-3), but 



