No. 144.] 85 



of the mummy pits, tombs and catacombs of ancient Egypt; and 

 having been commissioned during a former mineralogical investi- 

 gation of the valley of the Nile, and an exploration of Upper 

 Egypt as far as Mount Zalora, to endeavor to discover the long 

 lost emerald quarries of that region, extending as far as 24° north 

 latitude on the borders of the Red Sea; to report also practically 

 upon this subject, with the facts recent in my memory, I give you 

 the statistical results which I contributed at the time to " Lo 

 Spettatore Egiziano," an Italian newspaper, published in Grand 

 Cairo, and there conducted with great zeal and ability under the 

 patronage of the late viceroy. Abbas Pasha. 



The quantity of mummies still preserved in the pits and to2nbs 

 in the valley of the Nile from Cairo to Thebes, and in the crypts 

 located in the Arabian and Lybian chain of mountains, appears 

 almost incredible except to those acquainted with those locali- 

 ties. 



Their knowledge of a perfect process of embalming (and which 

 the arid nature of the climate tended so much to assist) arising 

 from a religious belief in the doctrine of metempsychosis, and 

 which pr(^bably had its real origin in a hygienic necessity, made 

 the preservation of all the corpses of this great people a legal 

 duty from the earliest period of Egyptian history. Even if we 

 carry back its annals only to the period of Joseph's arrival at the 

 €ourt of the Pharauhs, (2028 B. C.,) and close them with the birth 

 of Christ, ancient Egypt appears to have figured as a powerful 

 nation over a period of 2,000 years. Her cities and towns were 

 redundant with a population of 8,000,000 (eight millions) souls. 

 There is everything in modern science to justify the belief that 

 the laws of biology in that remote era underwent no change, and 

 that the average length of life as now never exceeded thirty-three 

 years. The population of the valley of the Nile must, therefore, 

 have been renewed more than i^ixty times during the twenty-one 

 centuries I have taken as a basis, or in other words, above 

 500,000,000 (five hundred millions) of inhabitants died and were 

 buried in this fertile land, which combines all the conditions fa- 

 vorable to the rapid development of population. 



