To tell of all his work at the thirty-seven places in which he excavated would take a volume, and not a chapter. One of his greatest successes, though it dealt only with a Ptolemaic building, was the excavation of the very perfect temple of Edfu. He found it so completely covered with rubbish that an Arab village had established itself upon the roof of the ancient sanctuary of Horus. Mariette succeeded in getting these interlopers cleared away, and was at last able to reveal the whole of a building, which, while comparatively modern as Egyptian temples go, is yet one of the most complete and perfect specimens of Egyptian architecture, showing the almost pure type of temple architecture as it can be seen only in one or two other instances in the whole land. The great explorer’s work in Egypt lasted for almost exactly thirty years. Before his death on January 18, 1881, he had the satisfaction of knowing that the work of which he had so well laid the foundations would not be interrupted when he had to lay it down. He never, indeed, saw the accomplishment of his great life-dream, the completion of a Museum really worthy of the treasures which he had gathered. Sir Gaston Maspero, his able successor, has told us how that vision hovered round his death-bed, and cheered his last hours; but even to-day the great Museum at Cairo is scarcely worthy of the matchless stores which it holds, and it is becoming more and more doubtful whether Cairo is the right place for a collection of such priceless value. But at least Mariette accomplished one thing which will never be undone; he put a stop to the worst of the pillage of Egyptian antiquities which had gone on unchecked for half a century, and he established the fact that the proper place where the historical monuments of a great nation’s past should be gathered is on national soil, where they are at home, and where they have a value which could never be theirs if they were scattered through a score of alien collections. A noble statue keeps his memory alive in the Cairo Museum. Maspero tells us that a great personage who visited the Museum asked whether this monument was that of a Pharaoh or of a modern individual; and when he was told that it was the monument of Mariette, the founder of the Museum, “Mariette,” said he, “I did not know that the founder of the Museum was a woman!” Such is fame, even in the land where memories seem to endure longer than in any other spot on earth. But Mariette’s worth to the world does not depend on monuments, though he had so much to do with them, nor on great personages, though he suffered so much at their hands all his life. It lies in this, that he saved the relics of ancient Egyptian history from the bottomless bog of international jealousies and greed and insisted that a nation with a great past had the right and the responsibility to hold the treasures of that past within its own bounds--in trust for the world.