SIS 
Egyptian mummies. 
prepared mummies, and some of those parts are absent, on 
the other hand, which he stated never to have been touched 
in the inferior class of those singular preparations. These 
facts will be duly valued by the scholar, and the commen- 
tators of that historian ; and the explanation now given of 
the real mode of mummifying, will enable the lexicographer 
to advance with confidence, that the name mummy was given 
to such preparations from the circumstance of wax (mum in 
the Cophtic language), being the really preservative ingre- 
dient employed in their preparation. 
I have had occasion in the course of this paper to observe, 
that as by carefully taking into consideration the various 
facts which presented themselves during the examination of 
our mummy, it was natural to suppose, that the mode in 
which it had been prepared would be discovered ; so would 
that discovery be confirmed if, by acting on those facts, some- 
thing resembling a mummy could be produced ; and in the 
specimens which will be submitted to the members after the 
meeting, the different steps will be seen, by which I was led 
to what may be considered as an imitation of the Egyptian 
mummies.* 
* There were exhibited after the meeting four different specimens of imitative 
mummies, each of them illustrative of one or two of the successive stages of the 
process of embalming detailed in this essay ; the last being intended to illustrate all 
the stages together, and exhibiting a close resemblance to the Egyptian mummy 
itself. A still born child had been employed for the purpose, and this modern 
mummy has now been in existence upwards of three years, without bandage or 
covering of any kind, exposed to all sorts of temperature and rough usage without 
betraying the slightest vestige of decay or putrefaction. It is rather darker than 
the Egyptian mummy from the circumstance of a too concentrated solution of 
tannin having been employed in preparing it. 
