95 
NOTE on some MUMMY CATS, &c., from HGYPT. 
By Proressor W. A. Herpman, D.Sc. 
[Read 14th February, 1890. ] 
Upwarps of 200,000 mummied Cats and other animals 
were brought into Liverpool early in 1890, and were sold 
to be ground down for manure. They came from the 
ereat cat cemetery of Beni- Hasan, in Central Egypt, 
where there was formerly a celebrated temple of Pasht, the 
Cat-Goddess. When the mummies arrived in Liverpool 
they were all in a fragmentary condition, and the few 
specimens which I was able to secure for the Zoological 
Museum of University College, were chiefly heads of cats, 
ichneumons, a dog, and some fragments of crocodile. The 
cat heads are in various conditions, some being shapeless 
masses thickly coated with bitumen, others having frag- 
ments of the mummy cloth still wrapped round them, and 
others again being simply dried, the fur (in all cases of a 
yellowish colour) being present, and the ears, nose and 
vibrissze perfect. Mr. Clubb has succeeded in stripping the 
integument and subjacent tissues off several of the dried 
specimens so as to produce fairly good skulls, which can 
be measured and compared with those of their probable 
descendants, our present domestic cat. Mr. W. R. Melly 
has kindly measured for me as many of the mummy skulls 
as could be procured and several skulls of the common cat 
from the College collection, with the general result that 
the Hgyptian skulls are about one-fifth larger than those 
of our present cat. Taking an average domestic cat’s 
skull (A) as being 100 mm. in length, then the average 
length of our mummy skulls (B) is nearly 120 mm.; 
