38 MEMOIR OF LAMARCK. 



fectly recognizable. " It would seem," says the 

 professors of the museum at Paris, in their report on 

 these valuable remains*, " as if the superstition of 

 the ancient Egyptians had been inspired by Nature, 

 in order to transmit to future times a monument of 

 her history. By embalming with so much care the 

 brutes which were the objects of their foolish ado- 

 ration, that extraordinary and capricious people 

 have left us, in their sacred grottoes, almost com- 

 plete cabinets of zoology. The climate has con- 

 spired with the art of embalming to preserve bodies 

 from corruption, and we can now satisfy ourselves, 

 by our own eyes, what was the condition of many 

 species three thousand years ago. It is difficult to 

 restrain the transports of our imagination, when Ave 

 behold thus preserved, with their minutest bones, 

 the smallest portions of their skin, and in every 

 respect most perfectly recognizable, many animals, 

 ^*which at Thebes or Memphis, two or three thousand 

 years ago, had their own priests and altars." In 

 regard to these curious relicts, Lamarck was forced 

 to admit that they were identical with their living 

 descendants in the same country, and accounted for 

 it by saying that this happened because the climate 

 and other physical conditions of the latter had long 

 continued unaltered. But he makes no attempt to 

 account for the fact which is so fatal to his theory, 

 that these remains entirely correspond to individuals 

 of the same species in many different quarters of the 

 globe, where the physical conditions are so dis- 

 * Ann. du Museum d'Hist. Nat., torn. i. p. 234. 



