Indeed, the intermingling of humans and animals is inherent in all art and literature, as, instance the calling of Our Lord a Lamb, or the Holy Ghost, a Dove. Or, as to this day we call our children lambs or kittens, or, slangily, kids. As we still call a man an ass or a puppy; or a woman, a cat. An argument for evolution can perhaps be seen in the inevitable turning back to the animals for a description or representation of human types. At any rate, early man used this sort of humor almost exclusively, and so combined it with his serious thought, even his religions, that it was a permanently interwoven thread. And the exaggeration of this mimicry of animals resulted in the grotesque and from that to the monstrous, as the mind grew with what it fed on, and caricature developed and progressed. Also, a subtler demonstration of dawning wit and humor is seen in the deliberate and intentional burlesque of one picture by another. In the British Museum is an Egyptian papyrus showing a lion and a unicorn playing chess, which is a caricature of a picture frequently seen on ancient monuments. And in the Egyptian collection of the New York Historical Society there is a slab of limestone, dating back three thousand years, which depicts a lion, seated upon a throne as king. To him, a fox, caricaturing a High Priest, offers a goose and a fan. This, too, is a burlesque of a serious picture. Again, a lion is engaged in laying out the dead body of another animal, and a hippopotamus is washing his hands in a water jar. One of these burlesque pictures shows a soul doomed to return to its earthly home in the form of a pig. This picture, of such antiquity that it deeply impressed the Greeks and Romans, is part of the decoration of a king’s tomb. The ancient Egyptians, it may be gathered from their humorous pictures, were not averse to looking on the wine when it was red. Several delineations of Egyptian servants carrying home their masters after a carouse, are graphic and convincing; while others, equally so, show the convivial ones dancing, standing on their heads or belligerently wrestling. The tombs of the ancient Egyptians abound in these representations of over-merry occasions, and it all goes to prove the close connection in the primitive mind of the emotions of grief and mirth. Yet, _The Book of the Dead_ that monument of Egyptian literature, and the oldest in the world, contains only records of conquests and a few stories and moral sayings,--not a trace of humor. That, in ancient Egypt is represented solely by the ready and deft pencil of the caricaturist. * * * * * Though humor came to them later, the earliest records of the Eastern and Oriental countries show little or no traces of the comic.