Egyptian mummies. 30s 
The two preliminary and curious facts just detailed, con- 
nected with the art of embalming among the Egyptians, 
have never been noticed before. Neither Herodotus, nor 
Diodorus Siculus, mention them, and all the more modern 
writers are silent on the subject. 
The next fact worthy of notice, is the appearance of minute 
saline crystals, found in great abundance in almost every 
part of the external, but more particularly of the internal 
surface of the body. These, at first, had escaped notice ; but 
u'pon the various portions of the dissected mummy being 
exposed to the open air, in one of the rooms on the ground 
• floor in my house for some weeks, where a fire was kept, 
the appearance of the saline particles became strikingly 
visible. This saline efflorescence I gently swept off the sur- 
face with a new brush, and subjected to various analytical 
experiments, from which it results, that it consists of nitrate 
of potash, carbonate, sulphate, and muriate of soda, and traces 
of lime. Now, as as none of these salts have ever been ob- 
served to form spontaneously, either within or upon the sur- 
face of preserved human bodies, particularly where the con- 
tact of external air has been so studiously excluded as in the 
present case, it follows, that in the preparation of mum- 
mies, the embalmers must have had recourse to the immersion 
of the body into a saline solution of a mixed kind. Hero- 
dotus, indeed, states that the body was covered with natron 
for the space of seventy days ; but it is more probable, that 
the water of the celebrated natron lakes, which lay so con- 
veniently at hand, rendered more active by previous evapo- 
specimens of which I exhibited to the Society, and which gave to distilled water a 
deep brown colour, from which a precipitate is obtained by gelatine. 
