1 g8 Dr. Blumenbach's Observations 
1662, and particularly the very valuable body of a mummy 
which was opened by the apothecary Hertzog, at Gotha, m 
1715, and in which more idols, beetles, frogs (as symbols of 
fertility), nilometers, &c. were found, than was ever, to the 
best of my knowledge, known to have been contained m any 
other mummy whatever. 
But Herodotus, that very inquisitive and credulous historian 
(as one of the most learned and judicious antiquaries m Eng- 
land has named him), does not so much as mention either of 
these sorts of mummies ; nor does he speak of the rosin, or 
painted masks, although he expressly describes such painted 
integuments on the /Ethiopian mummies. 
Diodorus is equally silent as to the rosin, and the painted 
covering; whilst on the other hand he advances some very 
strange assertions, such as that the skill of the embalmers ex- 
tended so far as perfectly to preserve the lineaments of the 
face although the faces of mummies of both sorts be gene- 
rally covered with cotton cloth to the thickness of nearly a 
man’s hand.* . _ , A 
These authors, although they have both been in Egyp » a 
probably their intelligence merely from hearsay ; for, on the 
other hand, it would no doubt be too paradoxical to assert, 
that all the mummies we are now acquainted with have been 
made since the days of Diodorus, and that none of those 
described by him and by Herodotus should have reached 
our time Count Caylus rather conjectures, that no mum- 
mies were made since the conquest of Egypt by the Romans 
(about the time of Diodorus) ; but in this he is manifestly 
mistaken, since we learn from St. Augustin that so low down 
* This had already beenjioticed by Middleton-, Z. e. 
