PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 847 



empire. Questions of the origin of races are, after all, only academic ; but the 

 other two, more especially the last, are intimately bound up wilh tbe hie ot 

 the nation. If the present policy of our legislators is adherred to, the moral 

 and the physical standard ot the British citizen will steadily deteriorate, for the 

 population will gradually come to consist of the posterity of those who are 

 themselves sprang from many generations of the most unfit. Should this unfor- 

 tunately come to pass, it will be the result of human pride refusing to apply to 

 the human race the laws which inexorably regulate all Nature. 



The following Papers were read : — 



1. The History of Mummification in Egypt. 

 By Professor G. J^lliot Smith, AI.A., M.D., F.R.S. 



lu predynastic times in Egypt it was the custom to bury the bodies of the 

 dead in the sand, roughly wrapped in skins, Imen, or matting. As the result 

 of the dryness of the soil, and the exclusion of the air by the close adaptation 

 of the sand to the body, desiccation often occurred before any putrefactive 

 changes set in, and the corpse thus became preserved in a permanent torm. 



inis phenomenon must have been perfectly familiar to the prehistoric 

 Egyptians themselves, for we have abuuaant evidence of the fact tliat plun- 

 dering of graves was common even at this early period. Moreover, the people 

 of later times must have learnt for themselves how excellently Nature preserved 

 the corpses of .their predecessors, when they came to make tombs for tiiemselves 

 in long- forgotten predynastic graveyards. 



Thus the idea must have naturally presented itself to the Egyptian people, 

 perhaps in early dynastic times, to attempt to secure by art the preservation of 

 their dead, which vvas no longer attained naturally, once it became the custom 

 to put the body into a coffin or a rock-cut chamber, because the air thus buried 

 •witn the corpse favoured putrefaction. The Egyptians would be encouraged in 

 these attempts, to which they no doubt were prompted by their religious beliefs 

 no less than by the natural inclination of all mankind to preserve the remains 

 of those dear to them, by the help which the properties of their soil and 

 climate aflorded them, as well as by iheir knowledge of the properties of the 

 preservative salts, found ready at naud in such abundance in Egypt, and of 

 the resins obtained from neighbouring lands, with tbe properties ot which they 

 had been famiUar even in predynastic times. In this way lUe origin of the idea, 

 the reason for attempting to put it into practice, and the means for doing so 

 become intelligible to us, and render it more than ever improbable that the 

 custom of embalming could have been imported into Egypt from some foreign 

 land, where none of these reasons for the initiation of the practice holds good. 

 We have no exact data to permit us to say exactly when embalming was tir&t 

 attempted in Egypt. Although the earliest bodies certainly known to have 

 been embalmed are of the period of the tenth dynasty (^found at Sakkara by 

 Mr. Quibell), there is some slight evidence to suggest that some form of mummi- 

 fication was attempted in the times of the earliest pyramid- builders. 



By the time of the Middle Empire the general technique of the operation 

 had attained tbe stage which in its main features was the conventional procedure 

 lor the succeeding two thousand years. Bat it was in the time of the New Empire 

 that the process of mummihcation reached its highest development. Then for the 

 hrst time the embulmers learnt how to remove tne brain and pack the cranium, 

 and put into practice the elaborate and difficult measures for restoring to the dead 

 body a greater semblance to the form it had had in life; so that the statue of the 

 deceased, which had been an essential part of the furniture of the tomb in earlier 

 times, when the body either underwent corruption or was imperfectly preserved, 

 became superduous, and was no longer put into ihe tomb. 



Further stages in the evolution of tne art of embalming were followed by a 

 papid decline. 



