312 
Dr. Granville's essay on 
The preceding explanatory description of what appears, 
from the unquestionable facts collected in the course of my 
inquiry, to have been the best, and, in my opinion, the pri- 
mitive mode of preparing mummies by the ancient Egyp- 
tians, differs from that found in Herodotus, as well as from 
those accounts which we read in other writers who came 
after him. It does not however appear that the eminent 
historian just mentioned had ever been present at the em- 
balming of a mummy, or that he ever had an opportunity 
of examining one of them. He must, therefore, like many 
other travellers, have noted down what he had collected 
from hearsay, in which, amidst much that was surmised, 
there was something approaching to the truth. It is in 
evidence that the art was kept a profound mystery among 
those who professed it, so that the different modes of em- 
balming described with such orderly minuteness of details 
by Herodotus, could only have been conjectural. It is a 
curious fact, that, with the exception of the lateral incision, 
and immersion into a saline solution mentioned by that histo- 
rian, we find no confirmatory evidence of the other steps of 
the supposed processes of embalming detailed by him in any 
of the various mummies that have hitherto been examined. 
And in the one now submitted to the inspection of the So- 
ciety, by far the most perfect that has yet been publicly 
described, we have none of the characteristic features of the 
three several modes of embalming which we are told were fol- 
lowed by the ancient Egyptians ; while, on the other hand, 
some of the lesser features of each process are strikingly 
apparent. We have, in fact, the presence of that which 
Herodotus asserted was invariably removed in the better 
