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Egyptian mummies. 
The bones were all more or less brittle, and some of them 
separated into splinters in the progress of the examination. 
After an interval of thirty years, we find the subject of 
Egyptian mummies again before the Royal Society, in con- 
sequence of a letter from Professor Blumenbach, to Sir Jo- 
seph Banks, being read at one of the meetings in 1794, 
giving an account of three small mummies, and a larger one, 
opened by the Professor when in London. The latter, as well 
as one of the former, belonged to the British Museum, and 
the curators had allowed him to select them from among those 
deposited in that national collection. In addition to these, 
Blumenbach re-examined the mummy of a child supposed 
to have been six years of age, which had been inspected be- 
fore. The first of these proved to be nothing else than a 
mass of bandages, strongly impregnated with resinous sub- 
stance, without the smallest vestige of a human body within 
them, affording another instance, in addition to those noticed 
by other writers on the subject, of the impositions practised 
either by the Egyptian embalmers, or by the modern traf- 
fickers in mummies. The second mummy opened by Blu- 
menbach proved to be that of an ibis. In the third supposed 
mummy, only one or two fragments of a human body were 
discovered ; while in the fourth, the largest, indeed the only 
real mummy, nothing but naked bones were found within 
the bandages, a result not far different from that which 
Blumenbach subsequently obtained from the examination of 
two other mummies belonging to private individuals, which 
he had an opportunity of opening before he quitted this 
country. Such is the sum total of the information to be found 
in the Transactions of the Royal Society on the subject of 
MDCCCXXV. P p 
