One of them restored M. Barrère’s cat. It is not possible to determine the period at which it was buried: the persons who found it were seekers of nitreous manure, or dealers in antiquities who took good care not to divulge the circumstances and the site of their discovery. But judging from the roundness of certain forms and the aspect of the bronze, we recognize the style of the second Saïte Period, and the piece is to be attributed either to the Nectanebos, or the first Ptolemies, in a general way to the fourth century B.C. or the beginning of the third century B.C. It was the time when the worship of Bastît and her subordinate forms, Pakhît, Maît, was most popular, the period when, near Speos-Artemidos, the most extensive cemetery of cats in Egypt was established. The execution is pure Egyptian, and in no way betrays any Greek influence. XXV A FIND OF CATS IN EGYPT[94] It was announced in the English newspapers, and the French followed suit, that a ship had recently reached London and disembarked 180,000 mummies of Egyptian cats. For a long time manufacturers of different nationalities have been accustomed to seek out the burying grounds of animals throughout Egypt, and to export the bones to Europe, where they are used as manure. A few years ago a necropolis full of monkeys was sent to Germany to manure beet-root fields. It seems that the cats of this year were discovered near Beni-Hassan; they were piled up at hazard in a sort of cavern, into which a fellah in search of antiquities was the first to penetrate. In fact, at some distance to the south of the hypogeums of Beni-Hassan, in the place called by geographers Speos-Artemidos, is a chapel hollowed out in the rock, and consecrated by the kings of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties to a local goddess, a woman’s body with a cat’s or lion’s head, called Pakhît. The depôt recently exploited was found there, and the cats which reposed in it must have lived in the vicinity, under the protection of their cousin, the goddess. Cemeteries of the same kind existed wherever a divinity of a feline type was worshipped, lion, tiger, or cat. The most celebrated was at Bubastis, in the delta, where the seekers of antiquities cleared away the rubbish about thirty-seven years ago.[95] The mummies of cats were buried there in _favissæ_, deep pits, some merely wrapped in swathings, others enclosed in little coffins reproducing the image of the animal. Some of these coffins are entirely of wood covered with white stucco, gilded, painted in bright colours; some are in bronze, others have the body in wood and the head in bronze, with gold rings in their ears and encrustations of gold on the forehead and in the eyes. Statuettes of cats of different sizes, portraits of the goddess Bastît with a cat’s head, or of the god Nofirtoumou, are mingled with the mummies. Thence come the thousands of bronze cats, big and little, with which all the antiquaries of Europe