THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 4I 



personages of the older historians, their later brethren by the force 

 of their genius and persistency of their industry, have made as real 

 to us as Julius Caesar or William the Conqueror. We can follow 

 their actions, call up a mental picture of the world they lived in and 

 pass our judgment on their motives. Their most sacred haunts, the 

 interiors of their temples and mausoleums, shrouded for ages in 

 silence and darkness, have re-echoed to the footstep of the intrusive 

 unhallowed stranger, and have revealed their beauty to the flash of 

 the magnesium wire and the lightning rapidity of modern photo- 

 graphy. But it is hard to make the events of a score of centuries 

 march before the mental vision in consecutive course, and harder 

 to describe the development through long ages of the inner and 

 spiritual life of a gifted people. The night of Egyptian darkness was 

 long, and the darkness was a thick darkness, to be felt. The dawn 

 has indeed broken, and we have glimpses of a civilization whose 

 very magnificence almost staggers our belief. But the most skilful 

 historian can give only a faint sketch, with many a broken line, of 

 these long ages, and we can never hope to enjoy as complete a pic- 

 ture of Egypt as Gibbon gives us of declining Imperial Rome. 



One striking trait in the character of the Egyptians was their 

 care of their dead. To understand whence that care arose, we must 

 know their views of the constitution of man. Dr. Maspero, an 

 authority on these questions, says the Egyptians regarded every 

 human being as consisting of the body ; the Ka, or double of the 

 body ; the Soul, Bi, represented as a hawk with a human head ; and 

 the Khoo, the " Luminous," a spark from the fire divine. The Dr. 

 further says that the Egyptians also believed, that if left to them- 

 selves after death any or all of these component parts of a human 

 being might pass into dissolution, when the man would die a second 

 time, be annihilated. Their piety to their ancestors averted that. 

 Embalming preserved the body, and prayers and offerings saved 

 the other constituent elements of the human being from second 

 death. 



In Egypt embalming of the dead was a profession, and the 

 fraternity were so jealous of their rights that the services of the 

 proper functionary of the district had to be secured in each case of 

 death. During the long periods of Egyptian history, new drugs 

 and processes were discovered, but the end aimed at — the preserva- 

 tion of the body from decay — remained the same. The late Dr. 



