It is our present purpose to see whether such a fact can be paralleled by researches into the past or by a short survey of the manners and customs of existing savage life itself—adding such of the singular or instructive funeral ceremonies of the various people as will prove interesting. Among the most ancient records are those of the Egyptians. The care of that extraordinary people for their dead, both as to actual preservation and that they should not become noxious to the living, has never been surpassed. This partly arose, it is true, from a superstitious reverence for the material part of man; but that superstition doubtless originated from the wise sanitary regulations of their early sages. The laws of Leviticus—many of them instituted to prevent disease and the depreciation of the species—formed, in like manner, a main part of the religion of the Jews. The ancient Egyptians believed that the soul would return, after the lapse of ages, to inhabit, in this world, the same body from which it had been separated by death. In this belief commenced the process of embalming by which the bodies of that people have been preserved with wonderful integrity to the present day. To so extraordinary a point had the antiseptic art been brought that, as appears from Diodorus, there was a mode of preservation which ensured the retaining of the eyebrows, eyelashes, and the general external character of the person, who could be recognised by their form and features. ‘Whence,’ says Dr. Pocock, in his Travels through Egypt, ‘many of the Egyptians kept the bodies of their ancestors in houses [but never near their own residences] adorned at a very great expense, and had the pleasure to see their forefathers, who had been dead many years before they were born, and to observe all their features as well as if they were living.’ The painter’s art has in modern times superseded these curious picture galleries. Another peculiarity could not have been due to superstition, but to a more rational care of the living than we at present evince, namely, the distance of their great burial-places from their chief cities. The Nile intervened; the Necropoli, including the range of stupendous pyramids, were formed on the western, while the most considerable towns were on the eastern bank of that river. Diodorus gives an interesting account of the ceremonies arising out of this wise arrangement.