furniture, and care is taken to provide them with female companions of the greatest beauty, who are also fed in the most luxurious manner: and when they die, they are lamented like favourite children, and are buried not according to the means of their attendants only, but often much more magnificently: for after the death of Alexander, when Ptolemy the son of Lagus had lately become King of Egypt, the Apis at Memphis happened to die of old age; and the person, who had the care of him, not only spent the whole of the allowances, which were very considerable, upon the funeral, but borrowed also fifty talents, or twelve thousand pounds, more of Ptolemy, to defray the expense: and within our own memory it has happened, that the guardians of these animals have spent not less than a hundred talents at their funeral. § 85. Besides these ceremonies, there are many other customs at the death of the sacred bull named Apis; for after he has been splendidly interred, the priests seek for a calf who is marked as nearly as possible in the same manner: and having found him, they release the public from their mourning, and the appointed persons carry the calf first to Nilopolis, where they feed him for forty days; and then embarking him on board of a yacht with a gilded cabin, they conduct him as a god to the sacred grove of Vulcan, at Memphis. In these forty days only, he is allowed to be seen by women, who perform certain evolutions before him, which are probably more amusing to his attendants than to himself: and at no other time are women allowed to see him. The reason of the honours paid to him is said to be, that at the death of Osiris, his soul transmigrated into this animal, and that it is continually transferred to his successors, when he dies: others however inform us, that when Osiris was killed by Typhon, his limbs were collected by Isis, and thrown into a wooden cow, covered with cotton cloths, and that the city was thence called Busiris. [It seems however that this must have been a Grecian fiction, for in Egyptian BUSIRIS must have meant the _tomb_ of Osiris, and not the _cow_.] For the deification of the other animals, as well as of their kings, a variety of reasons are assigned[; all as uninteresting as they are absurd; except the story of a hawk having brought, to the priest at Thebes, a book of laws and religious observances, tied up with purple; and that hence the Hierogrammates, or sacred scribes, were distinguished by a purple sash, and by wearing a hawk’s feather on their heads: that the crocodile is said to be venerated as the watchman of the Nile, preventing the predatory excursions, which would be undertaken, if the thieves could swim across the river in safety; and that the diversity of deities, worshipped in neighbouring parts of the country, is supposed by some to have originated in a political contrivance of the government, to keep the people in subjection, by preventing their too intimate union].