VOL. LXXXIV.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 3^7 



If we reflect during how many centuries, and through what a variety of revo- 

 lutions, the Egyptians have used the practice of muuimifying their dead bodies^ 

 it will naturally occur that we are not to expect in all mummies a similar charac- 

 teristic formation of the teeth, any more than we are to look. f(jr a similar cha- 

 racteristic national form in their productions of art. This peculiar structure of the 

 teeth was not observed in the two mummies I examined in the British Museum, 

 neither does it exist in our Gottingen mummy. A detached skull of a mummy 

 in the Museum, prepared with rosin, and which bore great resemblance to the 

 above-mentioned in its general form, and especially in the narrowness of the 

 poll, had unfortunately the crowns of the teeth so much mutilated, as to afford 

 no manner of information concerning this circumstance. The above observation 

 however appears, at all events, to be well worth attending to, as it may hereafter 

 prove a criterion for determining the period at which any given mummy has 

 been prepared. 



But what interested me most in Mr. Symmons's mummy was the mask, to 

 the 2 sides of which pieces of the bandages, with which the whole of the exterior 

 integuments had been fastened to the corpse, still adhered. The inner part of 

 this mask was sycamore wood, its outside being shaped, by means of a thick coat 

 of plaster, in bas-relief, into the form of a face, the surface of which seemed to 

 have been stained with natural colours, which time had now considerably blended 

 and obscured. Having however, with Mr. Symmons's leave, taken this mask, 

 together with some other very interesting pieces of his mummy, with me to 

 Gottingen, I there steeped it in warm water, and carefully separated all the parts 

 of it. By this means I discovered the various fraudulent artifices that had been 

 practised in the construction of this mask : the wooden part was evidently a piece 

 of the front of the sarcophagus of the mummy of a young person ; and in order 

 to convert its alto-relievo into the basso-relievo of the usual cotton mask of a 

 mummy, plaster had been applied on each side of the nose ; after which paper 

 had been ingeniouslj' pasted over the whole face, and lastly, this paper had been 

 stained with the colours generally observed on mummies. The small Sloanian 

 mummy in the Museum had probably been prepared nearly in the same manner. 

 That the deception has in both cases been very industriously executed, appears 

 from this, that as far as I can learn no one has observed it before, though both 

 these pieces have no doubt been often seen, and examined by persons conversant 

 with these matters. 



Some other suspicious circumstances in the mummies T examined in London 

 were more evident. For instance, the coflms of sycamore wood fastened toge- 

 ther with iron nails, in which the small mummies of Dr. Garthshore, Dr. Lett- 

 som, and S r W. Hamilton, were contained, had most probably been recently 

 constructed of pieces of decayed sarcophagi of ancient mummies. The little 



