MEMOIR OF LAMARCK. 
£8 
fectly recognizable. “ It would seem,” says the 
professors of the museum at Paris, in their report on 
these valuable remains*, “ as if the superstition of 
the ancient Egyptians had been inspired by Nature, 
in order to transmit to future times a monument of 
her history. By embalming with so much care the 
brutes which were the objects of their foolish ado- 
ration, that extraordinary and capricious people 
hare left us, in their sacred grottoes, almost com- 
plete cabinets of zoology. The climate has con- 
spired with the art of embalming to preserve bodies 
from corruption, and we can now satisfy ourselves, 
by our own eyes, what was the condition of many 
species three thousand years ago. It is difficult to 
restrain the transports of our imagination, when we 
behold thus preserved, with their minutest hones, 
the smallest portions of their skin, and in every 
respect most perfectly recognizable, many animals, 
which at Thebes or Memphis, two or three thousand 
years ago, had their own priests and altars.” In 
regard to these curious relicts, Lamarck was forced 
to admit that they were identical with their living 
descendants in the same country, and accounted for 
it by saying that this happened because the climate 
and other physical conditions of the latter had long 
continued unaltered. But he makes no attempt to 
account for the fact which is so fatal to his theory, 
that these remains entirely correspond to individuals 
of the same species in many different quarters of the 
globe, where the physical conditions are so dis- 
* Ann. du Museum d'Hist. Nat., tom. i. p. 234, 
