The theory of Pariset was communicated by him to the Académie de Médecine on 12 July, 1831, and finally published in a carefully designed and highly finished essay in 1837. It was received with much disfavour; according to his colleague Daremberg, the learned librarian of the Academy, nothing but its brilliant style could have saved it from being forgotten in a week. It was vigorously opposed by Clot Bey, on behalf of Egyptian officialdom, because it fixed upon Egypt the stigma of holding in the soil an inherent and abiding cause of the plague[301]. Besides the general objection that it was the theorizing of a _philosophe_, exception was taken to particular parts of the argument. Thus Labat demonstrated by arithmetic that the mummied carcases of all the generations of men and animals in Egypt for three thousand years would have required a space as large as the whole of Egypt, which should thus have become one vast ossuary. And as to the fact, he added, embalming was the privilege of the rich, and of some sacred species of animals. Clot Bey asserted that the whole class of slaves were not thought worthy of embalming. He found also, in the language used by Herodotus, evidence that the people of Egypt felt themselves to be under “the continual menace” of some great epidemic scourge and took precautions accordingly--the very ground on which Pariset based his theory. The objection which weighed most with Daremberg was the fact that, just about the time when Pariset had asserted the immunity of Egypt from plague in her prosperous days, evidence had been found, in the newly-discovered collections of Oribasius, that a bubonic disease was recorded for Egypt and Libya by a Greek physician two centuries before the Christian era, and by another Greek medical writer about the beginning of our era. It does not appear to have occurred to the opponents of Pariset’s theory that the two chief objections, first that embalming was far from general, and second that cases of plague did occur in ancient Egypt, answered each other. But, as matter of fact, it can be shown that there were cheaper forms of embalming practised for the great mass of the people. Again, it was found by De Maillet that bodies not embalmed at all, but laid in coarse cloths upon beds of charcoal under six or eight feet of sand at an elevation on the edge of the great plain of mummies at Memphis, and beyond the reach of the water, were as perfectly preserved from putrid decay as if they had been embalmed, the dry air and the nitrous soil contributing to their slow and inoffensive decomposition[302]. These facts tended to support the notion that it was not ceremony which really determined the national practice, but utility, into which neither art nor religion necessarily entered. The existence also of bubonic disease in the period of the Ptolemies proved that the risk assumed in Pariset’s theory was a real risk, the precautions having been not always sufficient to meet it.